The first of my summer reads is The Grapes of Math: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life by Alex Bellos, known as Alex Through the Looking Glass in the UK…. for a reason. I prefer the original title, because it shows the connection between mathematics and literature. Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, was lesser known as Charles Dodgson, a mathematician and logician.

As I have written about before, I am a numberphile, but unfortunately, numbers are not Jiaphiles. I have always been, without a doubt, humanities-minded, but I had a fantastic teacher in grade 10, who introduced to me the foundations of mathematics and pre-calculus and helped me to the first A I remember receiving in math. Math became a different kind of magic to me over the next few years. It was my little glimpse into the wonders of science. Two-thirds through my integral calculus course in university, however, I realized that barely passing math was just not in my wiring. Although I was fascinated by math, it was not worth making my GPA suffer.

Imagining a world in which I could not learn about math and draw sigmas and summands, however, made me quite sad. The next time I walked into a bookstore, I headed straight for the science shelf, and I found these creative non-fiction works related to math, and I knew I had found my outlet. Bellos’ Grapes of Math is the first book I’ve finished this summer.

I don’t know how to recommend it to the regular reader–that is, someone who didn’t venture into university calculus–because I think that some of the things I read made much more sense because I was familiar with e and π and and x, y. I do know that the book is written to be accessible to everyone. It is truly a book on how life reflects numbers and how numbers reflect life, and in that way, I think it is a book for the layperson.

The book is personal, interesting, and reads like a story. All of the concepts that I had taken for granted in school suddenly had a history and a discovery behind them. People had to think deeply about the important beginnings of chapters that I barely studied for. It made math feel like reading Hobbes’ Leviathan or Plato’s Republic… but the connection between Plato and math really isn’t that far.

The note on the author at the back of the book tells me that Bellos is a professor of not only mathematics, but of philosophy, and that is so important.

So many of my peers see science and art as something so separate from each other. Being “humanities-minded” means that I cannot appreciate mathematics… but nothing can be farther from the truth. The giants of mathematics, the shoulders of whom mathematicians and physicists like Newton sit on, were Greek philosophers. Mathematics, the purest of sciences, arose from the thinking and the search for wisdom involved in philosophy, perhaps seen as the “fluffiest” of the humanities.

When I wanted to specialize in both English and math, and I told people this, I always got a reaction. People said it was interesting that my brain worked like that. One of my oldest friends claimed my brain was “too powerful”, which he meant as a joke and was one that I laughed at. The art of mathematics reminds me so much of English. Reading The Grapes of Math reminded me that students of math are only studying and building upon discoveries and philosophies of mathematicians before them, using their theorems and proofs to solve real life problems. How different is that, really, from students of literature reading Shakespeare and Wordsworth and applying those stories to their own stories? How different is it from knowing the universal expectations of language and communication and using them to effectively articulate our original thoughts, to create greater and stronger connections between one another?

To me, I don’t see much of a difference. Thank you, Alex Bellos, for reminding me of that. ♥