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A review by lakmus
Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order by Steven Strogatz
5.0
This book will make being stuck in traffic jams exciting. Because suddenly, you are not bored to death in a smelly car, you are participating in an act of sync. It's basically like being one with nature and hugging trees.
On a more serious note, this is one of the most exciting popsci books I've read. In fact so exciting, I am actually kind of keen to go study up on math a bit more, because for the first time ever it looks (a) relevant to important and cool things (like fireflies and brains, of course, my favourite brains!), (b) not hellishly daunting.
The book is not about math per se, but the author shares many anecdotes from the lives of physicists and mathematicians who worked on problems related to chaos and sync and for the first time ever it seems to me the same kind of process as all other science (afaik) is done: it's messy and creative and you don't really know what you are doing, but you just gotta (for some reason) repeatedly plunge yourself into the same problem day after day trying to figure it out.
"Sync" perhaps could be recommended to high-schoolers starting to think math was invented specifically to torture children to death by tedium.
On a more serious note, this is one of the most exciting popsci books I've read. In fact so exciting, I am actually kind of keen to go study up on math a bit more, because for the first time ever it looks (a) relevant to important and cool things (like fireflies and brains, of course, my favourite brains!), (b) not hellishly daunting.
The book is not about math per se, but the author shares many anecdotes from the lives of physicists and mathematicians who worked on problems related to chaos and sync and for the first time ever it seems to me the same kind of process as all other science (afaik) is done: it's messy and creative and you don't really know what you are doing, but you just gotta (for some reason) repeatedly plunge yourself into the same problem day after day trying to figure it out.
"Sync" perhaps could be recommended to high-schoolers starting to think math was invented specifically to torture children to death by tedium.