Christian Robert has published a review of The Universe in Zero Words on his blog, Xi’an’s Og. A version of this review will also appear in Chance, published by the American Statistical Association.
I’ve been curious to see how my book will be received in the specialist literature (i.e., among professional mathematicians). The reason for my curiosity is that my primary audience is actually not mathematicians, but the general public. And yet, of course, I fully expect The Universe in Zero Words to be read and vetted by the professional community.
All in all, I think that the review is very fair and more or less as I would have expected. Robert’s main complaint is that the book does not include much statistics — specifically, Bayes’ formula. Alas, I have to plead guilty as charged! This was near the top of the list of formulas that I didn’t write about. I can show you an early draft of the table of contents with 45 equations, one of which was Bayes’ formula. But I had to cut it back to 24. Maybe I can write about those other 21 equations in a sequel.
(By the way, the Central Limit Theorem, or “bell-shaped curve,” made it even closer to the cut. It was still in the table of contents when I cut it to 28 equations. I’m not sure if I should mention this, because as a Bayesian, Robert might not like seeing a standard tool of frequentist statistics ranked higher than his favorite! This illustrates the sort of perils one has to navigate when writing a book that specialists might read. The general public, for the most part, won’t care.)
Another interesting comment in Robert’s review is the following: “Now, rather paradoxically (?) I learned more from the physics chapters: for instance, the chapters on Maxwell’s, Einstein’s, and Dirac’s formulae are very well done.” To me, this is a telling and very encouraging comment. I tried to write a book that a normal curious person (who is not an expert in the field) could learn something new from, and this shows that Robert appreciated the chapters that he was not reading as an expert. I am now looking forward to a review from a physicist saying the exact opposite: that he found the chapters on Maxwell, Einstein and Dirac to be boring but really liked the chapters on, say, non-Euclidean geometry and the Continuum Hypothesis!
Robert does have some very positive things to say, including this: “The book is very well-versed in the ancient history of mathematics, from Babylonian to Chinese mathematicians, in addition to the more well-known Greeks.” And this: “The Universe in Zero Words makes for an easy and pleasant read, as well as a wonderful gift for mathematically inclined (and English speaking) teenagers.”
Ironically, Robert learned something about the name of his own blog from my book! The word xi’an means lute string, in Chinese, but it also means the hypotenuse of a right triangle. This comes up in the chapter on the formula we call the Pythagorean theorem, but which the Chinese knew as the gou–gu rule.
Thanks, Christian, for being one of the first bloggers on the Web to notice my book!
