From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Okay! On to some reviews of books, as opposed to idiotic book descriptions. Described as "The Art of the Shortcut in Math and Life" I have to say up front that I was disappointed in this book. Maybe it’s just me, but there really didn’t seem to be anything here that I could use in my life, and worse than that, I didn't see much benefit in modern everyday life to be derived from the shortcuts that were discussed here. Some of the math and how it was arrived at historically was interesting, but it also felt rather repetitive after a while, and it was largely historical.
I am not a big fan of book descriptions which can be misleading at best, so I was amused by the one for this, which claims that the book is "above all practical." The description also said, "Du Sautoy explores ... whether you must really practice for ten thousand hours to become a concert violinist, and why shortcuts give us an advantage over even the most powerful AI." With regard to the violin: the people who did that study were annoyed when people started claiming they had discovered that it takes 10,000 hours to become a virtuoso. They said it misrepresented what they reported. The bottom-line is that are no shortcuts to becoming a maestro or a maestra.
The fact is that you do need to practice long and hard, and there's no way around that. Not that I plan on taking up the violin (or the cello, which is what was discussed here), but I resented that the book description suggested otherwise about shortcuts. The only shortcuts offered here were of the lesser variety - in that you can play a note in more than one way on a stringed instrument, so adjusting fingering can enable you to play a difficult piece more easily - but in order to realize that you still have to learn to play the piece competently - which is what takes the time! So this was misleading at best.
The part about "why shortcuts give us an advantage over even the most powerful AI" is equally misleading. AIs are not as bad as this indicates. Yes, they can make mistakes, but they can also find shortcuts humans failed to see, and they're getting better all the time. Humans really aren’t!
Based on the fact that this book really failed to deliver on the implied promise - that we can make use of math to inform us of beneficial shortcuts in our lives, I felt it failed. The book delivered on stories of how shortcuts have been found using math in the past, and even led to great discoveries, but none of this really had a whole heck of a lot to do with your average person's everyday life, and the book failed to offer anything I could see that would benefit me in my life. So while the math was interesting in places and some of the historical paths to discovery were educational, I felt the book fell short of its implied promise and I cannot commend it.
