Paulina Rowińska, "Mapmatics: A Mathematician's Guide to Navigating the World"

Описание: Explore the surprising connections between math and maps—and the myriad ways they’ve shaped our world and us.

Why are coastlines and borders so difficult to measure? How does a UPS driver deliver hundreds of packages in a single day? And where do elusive serial killers hide? The answers lie in the crucial connection between maps and math.

In Mapmatics, mathematician Paulina Rowińska leads us on a riveting journey around the globe to discover how maps and math are deeply entwined, and always have been. From a sixteenth-century map, an indispensable navigation tool that exaggerates the size of northern countries, to public transport maps that both guide and confound passengers, to congressional maps that can empower or silence whole communities, she reveals how maps and math have shaped not only our sense of space but our worldview. In her hands, we learn how to read maps like a mathematician—to extract richer information and, just as importantly, to question our conclusions by asking what we don’t see.

Written with authority and compassion, wit and unforgettable storytelling, this is math exposition at its best. By unpacking the math behind the maps we depend on, Mapmatics illuminates how our world works and, ultimately, how we can better look after it.

____________________________________________________________________

Paulina Rowińska, winner of the Austrian Science Book of the Year Award, is a Cambridge-based science writer with a PhD in mathematics. After years of creating interactive math and data science content for the educational platform Brilliant, she began a master’s in science journalism at MIT last fall. Mapmatics is her first book.

Brendan Kelly is the Director of Introductory Math at Harvard University. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Utah and a B.A. in Mathematics from The College of New Jersey. His books include Intermediate Algebra: A Functional Approach and Functions and their Rates of Change.