I just finished reading this book that gives you 'bite sized' introductions to various concepts in mathematics as well as the people behind them.
I have always been interested in mathematics (maths in the UK, but math in the US for some reason). I remember being put in the advanced class in primary school and I carried it through to A level as well as parts of my electrical engineering degree. That is not to say it always came easily to me. I found some of the advanced topics really hard. I have not really kept up my studies, but have used parts of it at various times. I got into fractals which use complex numbers and cryptography that uses prime numbers. There have also been times when I needed some geometry. Of course a lot of this related to my programming work and hobbies. Languages like Python have a lot of powerful facilities for mathematics, but you still need to understand the principles.
The book covers everything from basic counting to the latest work in data science. Discoveries are still being made, but most of the simple problems were solved long ago and the field is too wide for anyone to cover it all.
There is not a huge amount of text, but it is more about bullet points than long explanations. A lot of use is made of diagrams and colour.
I was bought this as a present and may not have bought it myself, but I did enjoy it and learnt a few things. You would need to find other books to go deeper into any of the topics.
The short biographies of mathematicians are fascinating. Many did their best work when young and some did not live too long. There are a few women in there despite them being excluded from a lot of formal education through history. What struck me was the number of Jewish mathematicians who had to flee their country of birth. Those countries lost out, but then discrimination based on race or culture is illogical.
I logged this read on GoodReads. I have been using that site for about ten years now. I used some other book sites before, but this one offered more facilities. I have wondered if someone could implement something similar on the blockchain. There are challenges in creating entries for every book out there as there can be many editions of each. On Hive you could have a page per book with comments used for reviews, but it needs someone to have responsibility for compiling the data. Any open platform is vulnerable to abuse.
Another 'life logging' service I have used is last.fm (formerly Audioscrobbler) that logs music listening. I have used that for nineteen years when I have listened to well over 100k tracks. That is automated as the apps I use send each play to the site. I know some people moved to more open source versions, but I just never got around to that and it would mean some tweaks to how I log. This is something else that could be on a blockchain, but could something like Hive handle the quantity of data? last.fm is probably tracking millions of plays each day. I like being able to see the statistics on what I have been listening to. This is different to books as I will only read most of those once and only get through a few each year.
Happy reading.
