Summer Reading List
Darren Glass
By Darren Glass, Gettysburg College
One of the hats I wear is as the book reviews editor for the American Mathematical Monthly. A recent issue featured a number of our colleagues listing their ‘Mathematical Comfort Foods’— mathy books that they have found themselves returning to for comfort during this strange year. A rare moment of modesty led me to resist contributing a choice of my own, so I was delighted when Math Values asked me to contribute a whole post’s worth of suggestions for your summer reading list. While I am also spending time this summer diving back into research and therefore often have my nose buried in books by Stanley, Hartshorne, or Silverman, I thought I would give you a half-dozen picks for books that are less technical and that I expect will appeal to all MAA members.
My first pick is actually the book I read most recently, Jordan Ellenberg’s Shape. I expect that many of the readers of this blog know Jordan personally, or have seen him give talks at conferences, or read his last book How Not To Be Wrong. If you are in any of these categories then you fully expect his new book to be simultaneously insightful, witty, and a great story, and you won’t be disappointed. This book looks at geometry and how it appears in all kinds of unusual places ranging from gerrymandering to artificial intelligence, and he does it all with a lot of humor and charm – I mean, how many math books can you think of with their own Spotify playlist? A number of the topics will be familiar to readers of this blog, but if you don’t mind your beach reads to be sprinkled with some equations and proofs, this is a great choice!
A more conventional beach read is The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone. While the book is light on actual mathematics, it is a wonderfully told biography of the codebreaker Elizebeth Friedman. She may not be as famous as her husband William, but Elizebeth was instrumental to both military efforts and to the FBI. This story has it all: love, Nazis, sexism, spies, and quirky characters, not to mention cameos by people like Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl. Even a mediocre writer could turn the story of Elizebeth Friedman into a great read, and in the hands of a writer as good as Fagone, the book is one that I could not put down. There was recently a PBS special based on the book and it is being adapted as a fictional miniseries, but the book is worth your time.
While it isn’t exactly light beach reading, one recent book that all of us who are involved in teaching students should read is Asked and Answered: Dialogues On Advocating For Students of Color in Mathematics by Pamela Harris and Aris Winger. While the subject is important and often challenging (particularly for those of us who identify as cis-gendered straight white men) and some of the stories they tell are heartbreaking, the authors do a great job of keeping the tone just light enough that the book is very readable. I know that it gave me a lot to think about as I plan my future teaching. You can read more about the book in a recent blogpost that Harris and Winger wrote for Math Values, and if you prefer things in audio form, the two authors host a podcast entitled Mathematically Uncensored where, as they say, “our talk is real and complex but never discrete.”
While I am mentioning racial justice issues, I will say that the book I have recommended more and most emphatically to people this year is The Sum Of Us by Heather McGhee. While this book does not explicitly discuss mathematics, it does a very good job of using both data and storytelling to show how many of the problems in American society trace back to the ways that people view things as a zero-sum game and how our inability to move past this is to everybody’s detriment. You may not agree with all of McGhee’s conclusions, but this book is a must-read for people thinking about American life and politics in the 21st century.
A book I read a couple of years back that found its way into my classroom was Ben Orlin’s Change is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World. You may be familiar with Ben’s work from his Math with Bad Drawings website or even a recent post on this blog. In this book, he turns his eye to topics in Calculus, using it to look at a wide range of history and applications, some of which you will expect but also including the topics love, literature, and dogs. As always, Orlin’s writing comes with a great sense of humor and, yes, some bad drawings. It won’t replace your Calculus textbook of choice, but anyone who teaches Calculus will find this book full of stories they will enjoy and want to share with their own students.
Finally, while we are hopefully at the beginning of the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, at least in the United States, it feels appropriate to recognize one of the early losses of the pandemic, John H. Conway. One way to do so is to read Siobhan Roberts’ biography of Conway, Genius at Play. Roberts does an excellent job of telling the life-story of one of the modern era’s most fascinating mathematicians, both in terms of his eccentric personality and his deep and wide-ranging mathematical interests. And she doesn’t shy away from some of the rough edges in Conway’s personality, despite the fact that she had much access to Conway while researching the book.
It has been a long year, and for most of us one of the most challenging of our careers. Whatever you end up reading this summer, I hope you all have a chance to rest and rejuvenate. And if you find yourself reading something particularly good, let me know as I always love a good recommendation!
Darren has been a mathematics professor at Gettysburg College for 15 years, where his teaching and research interests include number theory, graph theory, and cryptography. He has recently started as Dean of Natural Sciences, Computer Science, & Mathematics at Gettysburg. He has also served as the chair of the MAA Basic Library List Committee, and has written countless book reviews for a wide range of outlets. He always loves getting book recommendations, so please send him yours at dglass@gettysburg.edu.