Shape by Jordan Ellenberg
8.5 out of 10Imagine that you shuffle a deck of cards. In the space of all possible outcomes, what is the distance between the original deck and the shuffled deck? Think about the shapes formed by points in that space. The shapes in all possible chess games. The shapes in all possible gerrymandered representative district maps. The shapes of word associations. The shapes of pandemics or 6-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon. The shapes of machine learning and recommendation systems. The shapes of our physical world, our ignorance, and ourselves.
It is difficult to write books about heady math topics. Ellenberg is near optimal. His style is charmingly folksy. Any less folksy and he would be a dry monotonous professor. Any more and he would be an overexerted clown.