Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension by Matt Parker

Of course there are many things to make and do, and it is often recreational mathematics, but there are also surprisingly many serious mathematical topics embedded in this seemingly relaxing narrative and, most important for the objective of the book, they are very well explained for the layman. Parker goes on to other advanced topics such as the zeta function, Cantor's aleph numbers and Gödel's incompleteness theorems. So he starts on a long journey meandering through a very diverse set of math related topics that leads to sphere packing in hypercubes and other objects in the fourth and higher dimensions. That being said and given the title of the book, Parker promises a lot, but to better understand everything that is needed to work in the fourth dimension, one has to start from the beginning and build things up step by step. As Richard Hamming formulated it in 1980: Mathematics is unreasonably effective. That mathematics is useful and turns out to have practical applications is a fortunate side effect. One should not necessarily necessarily do mathematics to solve particular problems. However, what Parker takes as a starting point is that mathematics is fun to do and that people should start doing mathematics for the fun of it. Many people experience mathematics as annoyingly difficult, extremely boring, and exclusively for nerds. In fact, that is a major point he wants to make with this book.

So you may expect this book to be fun as well. Matt Parker is a 'standup-mathematician', i.e., stand-up comedian and a maths communicator and he loves to mix both.

Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension by Matt Parker