ONLINE: Jordan Ellenberg

×

Expand

Jordan Ellenberg

Want to avoid math? In the 2014 best-selling book How Not to Be Wrong, author Jordan Ellenberg demonstrated just how quixotic a goal that is. Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy and Everything Else — the new book from Ellenberg, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Mathematics at UW-Madison — may sound even scarier to some of us. But never fear, my math-averse brothers and sisters; Ellenberg writes to encourage understanding by all. He will discuss topics from the new book with data expert Meredith Broussard during a livestream talk hosted by Mystery to Me; register here.

press release: Local (and New York Times Bestselling-) author, Jordan Ellenberg, discusses his latest book, SHAPE: THE HIDDEN GEOMETRY OF INFORMATION, BIOLOGY, STRATEGY, DEMOCRACY AND EVERYTHING ELSE with data expert Meredith Broussard, who is featured in the Netflix documentary “Coded Bias.”

About the Book

From the New York Times-bestselling author of How Not to Be Wrong, himself a world-class geometer, a far-ranging exploration of the power of geometry, which turns out to help us think better about practically everything

How should a democracy choose its representatives? How can you stop a pandemic from sweeping the world? How do computers learn to play chess, and why is learning chess so much easier for them than learning to read a sentence? Can ancient Greek proportions predict the stock market? (Sorry, no.) What should your kids learn in school if they really want to learn to think? All these are questions about geometry.

For real. If you're like most people, geometry is a sterile and dimly-remembered exercise you gladly left behind in the dust of 9th grade, along with your braces and active romantic interest in pop singers. If you recall any of it, it's plodding through a series of miniscule steps, only to prove some fact about triangles that was obvious to you in the first place. That's not geometry. OK, it is geometry, but only a tiny part, a border section that has as much to do with geometry in all its flush modern richness as conjugating a verb has to do with a great novel.

Shape reveals the geometry underneath some of the most important scientific, political, and philosophical problems we face. Geometry asks: where are things? Which things are near each other? How can you get from one thing to another thing? Those are important questions. The word "geometry," from the Greek, has the rather grand meaning of "measuring the world." If anything, that's an undersell. Geometry doesn't just measure the world - it explains it. Shape shows us how.