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The Math Book, by Clifford A. Pickover

Article  in  Journal of Mathematics and the Arts · September 2011

DOI: 10.1080/17513472.2011.581869

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Stephen Luecking
DePaul University
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The Math Book, by Clifford A. Pickover, Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., New York, NY,
2009, 528 pp, Hardcover , ISBN: 978-1-402-75796-9, US $29.95.

A time-honored debate in the philosophy of mathematics is whether one discovers or whether one
invents mathematics. Like the particle-wave dichotomy of the quantum the answer is likely both.
However, either on its own is sufficient to account for the intellectual pleasure – call it joy – of
the practice of mathematics. Conveying this joy has long been a hallmark of the prolific writings
of Clifford Pickover. He has written like a journalist with a punch that can only be powered by a
genuine joy in his work. This holds true for his recent work The Math Book: From Pythagoras to
the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics.

The book is comfortably sized for armchair reading: a bit too small for the coffee table and a bit
too large for the bathroom, although serviceable for each. In it Pickover serves up a mathematical
feast in 250 bite-sized servings. To each he dedicates exactly two pages: to the left a few
paragraphs on a select topic from the history of mathematics and to the right a full color, full page
illustration. But the net result is one-half, the left half, of a good book.

Only 250 items of interest from the entire history of mathematics leaves the author open to
quibbling over what was included and what was left out of the book. In his introduction Pickover
sidesteps this by making it clear that the choices are idiosyncratic. What matters to the reader are
that his choices provide a substantive taste of the nature of mathematics (they do), and that the
spread of ideas presented serves the breadth of mathematics (it does). However, referring to all of
these as milestones is overstating a number of his choices. Pickover biases towards puzzles and
games and this reviewer could use more persuasion that Rubik’s cube and Frank Armbruster’s
similar Instant Insanity in sum comprise nearly one percent of the milestones of mathematics.

One of the book’s pleasures is that, with only one page of text per topic, the reader nevertheless
procures a satisfying introduction to each milestone along with a desire to learn more. At the
bottom of each text block the author provides links to other related topics within the book to
provide some necessary continuity between topics. An appendix lists suggestions for further
reading on each milestone.

Pickover’s overall format, when combined with his choice of illustrations, however, proves
problematic. He is nearly absolute in limiting his text to a single page and assigning one page to
one image. In a handful of exceptions a thumbnail illustration wanders to the left page. When the
choice of illustrations is left wanting, as it often is, the book suffers.

Pickover augments a common canard found in histories of mathematics: the depiction of early
Arabic mathematicians, where, due to the prohibitions of Islam, no images exist, by reproducing
modern stamps issued in their honor. Most authors keep the images small, since they appear on
stamps. In The Math Book, though, Pickover reproduces the stamps of al-Kashi and al-Khuarizmi
to full-page where they noticeably blur with the enlargement. This is a common and even
expected misfire. Other choices, however, left this reviewer agog, as in the case where he depicts
the heptadecagon, whose proof of construction by Gauss is one of his milestones, as a fishbowl
replete with a goldfish. There is no hint of the milestone at hand, i.e., the actual construction of
the heptadecagon. All the reader learns is that a polygon with a large number of edges looks
round like a fishbowl. A depiction of an actual construction is far more elegant – and informative
– than a goldfish bowl.
Also high in the “what was he thinking” rankings is a graphic, "We Have Died and Gone to
Möbius Heaven" by Slovenian artist Teja Krasek and the author, for the Möbius band in which
colorfully decorated versions of the band flit through the air amongst bubbles and stars. The
Möbius band is perhaps the most over-used subject of mathematical artists and many far less
banal and far more informative images abound. Since Pickover wrote an entire book on the
subject (The Möbius Strip: Dr. August Möbius's Marvelous Band in Mathematics, Games,
Literature, Art, Technology, and Cosmology), he is well aware of these.

Some readers might tolerate these as whimsy, but the key to effective art editing is ultimately a
synergy of image with text. One criterion for selection is that the art informs the presentation of
the mathematics by illustrating a significant aspect or extending the concept at hand, that it either
augments the text or it is not used. The least effective are those, which suffice only to distract
(goldfish and airborne ornaments) or in which artful affect reduces information. Over-cropping
photographs is one such affectation. An image of Napier’s bones, for example, depicts just a few
of the cogs. With an entire page at the ready, why not the entire machine? Similarly the
unsatisfying cropping of Carlos Sequin’s sculpture of a sphere inversion leaves it partially
occluded.
A similar reduction in pertinent information emerges when puffed out graphics step in, where a
simple diagram would do fine. A full page graphic, in one instance, illustrates the cardiod as an
envelope of tubes. In the text Pickover states the curve’s relationship to epicycloids and further
cites Albrecht Dürer’s work that predated Etienne Pascal’s limaҫon by a century and a quarter. A
break with the one-page-one image format could add diagrams of other cycloids or include
Dürer’s own published drawing of the cardioid or, even more intriguingly, that artist’s illustration
of the drawing tool he devised for drawing epicycloids. In other instances full page, full color
blowups of geometric theorems like Pappus’ hexagon theorem or the quadrature of the lune carry
no more awareness than would a quarter page diagram.

Despite the many misfires and missed opportunities on the visual end, it is to his credit that
Pickover attempts to use works of art to illustrate the milestones either with contributed work of
unique computer graphics such as those by the prolific Jos Leys, or by obtaining reproduction
rights to existing works of art. In the best cases this not only illuminates the mathematics, but also
informs the reader on connections between mathematics and art. Observing the two in tandem can
more intensely convey the twin intellectual joys of discovery and invention. Much appreciated are
reproductions of Robert Bosch’s ornamental application of the Jordan curve or Dániel Erdély
sculpture of a spidron polyhedron.

Pickover also misses opportunities where the use of artworks can inform as to the connections of
mathematics to culture or to touch more vividly on the history embedding his milestones. His
representation of Sangaku geometry, for example, is a graphic of one of the theorems proffered
by these devotional tablets, rather than of the actual tablet mounted at a Shinto shrine. An
unfortunate omission, since the tablets are less significant as mathematics than as the role of
mathematics in culture. In another example he features a stock blow-up of modern plastic dice in
his discussion of dice and chance. Since Pickover stresses the antiquity of dice and the study of
chance, a far more effective image would be that of the ancient Iranian dice he cites, which in
appearance are almost exactly like those of today.

A significant problem in illustrating mathematics is that subjects are often so abstract as to defy
physical presentation. (Very few math artists create work about group theory.) An intriguing
attempt to overcome this is Pickover’s choice to accompany Robert Langlands’ elegant
conjecture linking analytics and algebra. He chose the image of the ornate interior of the cathedral
of Notre-Dame de Fourviére in Lyons to wisely evoke the elegance, rather than portray the
content he perceived in Langlands’ ideas.
 The choice of this cathedral with its intense decoration reveals something of The Math Book and
its author in general. The book unfortunately does not identify the cathedral or its architect, Pierre
Bossan. This devalues the image. As are so many of the books illustrations, its value is as a stock
image and was chosen because a past writer compared the mathematical elegance of Langland’s
work to that of a cathedral. Like so much of the imagery in the book its inclusion is driven by a
sophisticated impulse, but ill considered. The Neo-Byzantine cathedral seems important here
because, despite its excesses, it does portray beauty that is joyful and celebratory and dedicated to
a supreme entity. The “supreme” beauty that Pickover finds in mathematics is not contemplative,
not “a beauty cold and austere” like that seen by Bertrand Russell.

Stephen Luecking
DePaul University
School of Computer Science
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Email: sluecking@gmail.com

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