Nature’s Numbers: The Unreal Reality of Mathematics

Nature’s Numbers: The Unreal Reality of Mathematics

By: Ian Stewart

The main purpose of this book is to show how many uncertain things that are involved in math. The chapters dive into the deeper meanings of what is meant by some of math’s most complicated questions. The chapters are entitled; The Natural Order, What Mathematics Is For, What Mathematics Is About, The Constants of Change, From Violins to Videos, Broken Symmetry, The Rhythm of Life, Do Dice Play God? and Drops, Dynamics, and Daisies.

My favorite chapter is chapter 8, Do Dice Play God. I like this chapter the best because it talks about some of the more interesting questions in math. One of the topics that is discussed is something that we encounter almost everyday. The scenario that they is the fact that we walk down stairs almost everyday and never have a problem, and then comes the day that we twist our ankle. Another scenario that they give that hit close to home because we talked about it in class, was the example of placing a bet on a favorite horse and all of the sudden in the last corner the horse falls and loses. Albert Einstein refused to believe in a universe in which God plays dice, it is more realistic to believe in a universe in which dice play God. Another great mathematical astronomer named Pierre-Simon de Laplace claimed that our world is deterministic, meaning that it is governed by chance.

There is a new theory called nonlinear dynamics, also known as the chaos theory. This theory tries to prove Laplace wrong. It is changing the way we think