Reviews

On this page, you can find out what we think of recent books, films, games, and anything else vaguely mathematical. Full reviews of many of the items featured here can be found at d chalkdustmagazine.com

Only Connect

This was a thrilling final, with fiendish questions and some excellent quizzing. It was also lovely to be able to support long-time friend of Chalkdust, Katie Steckles, and her team. What comes next in this sequence:

g g i i i g g g i i g g g g i ?

g g g g g

The Tired Sounds of

Stars of the Lid Great lockdown album. g g g g g

Stars of the Lid

and their Refinement of the Decline Perhaps the only thing better thanThe Tired Sounds of... g g g g g

Klax

It’s no longer the nineties, but there’s still time for Klax. g g g i i

Formalized Music

Iannis Xenakis Formalised Music is a manual, of sorts, to create a machine that writes music. It can be quite frustrating to decipher Xenakis’s writing, but his ideas on on the mathematics of composition remain influential and are worth exploring. g g h i i

Poems and Paradoxes

Kyle Evans & Hana Ayoob A really fun collection of mathematical titbits and poems with delightful artwork. g g g g h

Apollo 13

Brilliant. The 13th numbered thing is always the best. g g g g g

Virtual meetings

There’s no √−�� in MS Teams. I just wish i wasn’t on it all the time. g i i i i

Molly and the Mathematical Mystery by Eugenia Cheng and Aleksandra Artymowska

This is a beautiful book. Its pages are large, and full of wonderful illustrations. On each page, the reader is encouraged to help Molly continue on her adventure by finding information under flaps, opening flaps to change available routes, or even using the flaps to construct a path for Molly that takes her out of the page.

This book was selected by the editors ofChalkdust to be theChalkdust Book of the Year 2020, based on our four judging criteria: style, control, damage and aggression.

Chalkdust Readers’ Choice 2020

Mathematical Adventures! by Ioanna Georgiou and Asuka Young

This book doesn’t shy away from difficult ideas, such as the existence of different sizes of infinity, and offers an excellent opportunity for a child to meet interesting bits of maths that would often be deemed ‘too difficult’ for a few more years. This book would be a great way to rediscover and share these interesting mathematical ideas with a younger relative.

This book was voted by our readers to be the Chalkdust Readers’ Choice 2020.

Shortlisted

The winners were selected from our shortlist of seven books released in 2020. The seven nonwinning books are all also very good. They were:

The Wonder Book of Geometry by David Acheson;How to Make the World Add Upby Tim Harford; Hello Numbers! What Can You Do? by Edmund Harriss, Houston Hughes and Brian Rea; Why Study Mathematics? by Vicky Neale; andGeometry Juniors by Ed Southall.