The Wonder Book of Geometry

Chalkdust

9 March 2021

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David Acheson is a mathematician at Jesus College, University of Oxford. The Wonder Book of Geometry (Amazon UK, Waterstones, Oxford University Press) is a book that takes the reader on a journey through the world of geometry.

Style

The Wonder Book of Geometry starts by recounting a story of a young David Acheson being surprised: he drew a semicircle, picked a point, then draw lines from the endpoints of the diameter to the point. He then measured the angle. To his surprise, the angle was always 90°, now matter where the point was placed. Mathematics is full of this type of surprise, and this book shares many situations with the reader. Many of them may be familiar to many readers, but you cannot fail to enjoy a nice surprise at a fair few of them.

Control

After showing the 90° semicircle fact, The Wonder Book of Geometry looks at why it is true. This is another very satisfying bit of maths, as when viewed in the right way, the result goes from being surprising to being ‘obvious’. Rather than spoiling the result by taking away the mystery, seeing how it is true in this way actually makes is better. As David puts it: “this is often one of the hallmarks of mathematics at its best.”

Damage

While the book starts with the kind of angles, areas, and shapes that will be familiar from secondary school (although going back and seeing why these results are true is always fun), it soon moves into less familiar territory, covering less well known results related to circles and triangles, as well as other topics such as sphere packing an non-Euclidean geometry.

Aggression

I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to rekindle their love of geometry, or looking to revisit geometry and leave with a deeper understanding of why things are true.

Now that we’ve review all the book’s on this year’s shortlist, you can vote for your favourite. The book with the highest number of votes will be crowned the 2020 Readers’ Choice. Voting closes at 5pm on Saturday 13 March.

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