Geekspeak: How Life + Mathematics = Happiness

"Geekspeak: How Life + Mathematics = Happiness" by Graham Tattersall, an English freelance engineer, is a fun and fascinating read. If you are a math teacher, I recommend you consider using this book as the text for your course. At the least, get a copy for yourself as a resource for lesson planning. The problems in this book are far more interesting than the traditional two trains traveling at different speeds. For example, Tattersall explains how to calculate the time it would take Scotty to beam you from Earth to Mars. Or how to determine the speed in miles per hour of a sneeze as compared to a fart. Now that's interesting! If you prefer to consider more serious issues, there is calculating the number of trees you would need to plant each year to offset your carbon footprint. Or how to determine which is more efficient, a car powered by gasoline or electricity. Geekspeak is for everyone. This book could even be a cure for those who have a phobia for math. Tattersall's purpose is to help non-mathematicians use figures to analyze and understand the world better. He laments that we have come to rely too heavily on experts without checking for ourselves the reliability of their advice. What is the danger of sea levels rising because of melting artic ice? How much energy does it take to construct a home? How has smaller families contributed to lower social connectivity and loss of community? These are a few questions Tattersall addresses using math. There is also plenty for trivia enthusiasts. Learn how to calculate how many flies it would take to pull a car. Determine how long you could keep a 100-watt light bulb lit with the energy released by jumping off a 300-foot cliff. Be able to tell the weight of a bus by simply looking at it. Tattersall has a clear and engaging writing style. This is no dry mathematical treatise filled with complicated formulas. In fact, most of the math in the book can be done in your head. Tattersall has an entire chapter on things you can figure out while sitting on a deck chair at the beach. If you are a student who complains that math is irrelevant to everyday life, read this book. If you are out of school and glad you are no longer tortured having to take math classes, read this book; it will help you develop an appreciation and interest in math you never thought possible. If you want to be an informed citizen, read this book. If you are just looking for something to read while sunning yourself on the beach, take this book along. You'll discover just how enjoyable math can be. Who would have thought being a geek could be so much fun?

This is a book demonstrating how you can calculate all kinds of things which you probably have never wondered about or wanted to calculate. It answers questions like "How statistically significant are disasters in relation to mortality rates overall?" and "How would sugar compare in terms of fuel efficiency to gasoline, if reality were left out of the calculations entirely?" More than merely giving these answers, though, the author is trying to persuade us to make these and similar calculations ourselves, for fun and for greater understanding of the world. I can imagine three responses to this book. First, there are those who find that their eyes slide off the page when there are lots of numbers and equations on it. These people won't read the book. If they are really determined, and try to get through it just by skipping the numbers, they will be completely mystified by the thought that anyone would find that their happiness was enhanced by knowing the amount of space their nation needs to bury their dead every year. They will worry about Dr. Tattersall and will not enjoy this book, even for its droll humor. At the other end of the spectrum are those who will actually spend an afternoon calculating the size of their personal vacabularies or the weight of their heads or the volume of their personal flatus. This book might be for them a sort of activity book. I hope these people get together in groups to do these things, or at least compare their results via twitter. In the middle are those like me, who will enjoy the antic humor and the intriguing ideas and admire the thought processes without actually getting up and going to a markerboard to make the calculations for ourselves. We'll enjoy this book a great deal, but Dr. Tattersall might be a bit disappointed in us.

I'm a geek; my children are geeks. We love to just know random facts and this book is a great facilitator for people like us. The opening of the book tells how the author discovered that he too was a geek. From there the chapters each focus on one type of arbitrary piece of knowledge like "how many words are in your vocabulary?" or "how many flies does it take to pull your car?". Totally useless information but oh so interesting! This is not a "sit down and read cover to cover" book. Instead, you want to pick a chapter that sounds intriguing, get comfortable and read it. The chapters are really short but you're going to want to take some time to think through the solution and maybe even do a little math to find the answer for yourself. If you don't care about being able to figure out random useless (and some not so useless) information or you aren't in to doing math just for the fun of it then you probably won't like this book. But, the real geeks out there will love it.

If you are the type of person with a curious mind and love math, this is the book for you. The author will take you on a fascinating journey into his own curious mathematical mind and how he takes complicated problems and solves them relatively easily. How many words are in your vocabulary? No problem, just count the number of words on a sample page of your favorite dictionary, then multiply this number by the books total pages. Now take 100 words from any page at random and test yourself, how many do you know out of 100, 60? Now, if there are 50 words per page and there are a total of 1000 pages then the dictionary contains 50,000 words if you know 60 out of 100 of these sample words then it is a good estimate that you know 60% of the words in the rest of the book, which brings us to a vocabulary of 30,000 words. The author does this with many other problems, I found each one very interesting and I will no longer look at large mathematical problems the same way again. This is one of those rare books that will change the way you think while reading it. I was very good at quick math solutions before I read this book, but this improved my abilities to estimate even bigger problems more quickly. This book was entertaining and fascinating from cover to cover. I believe that Geekspeak has made math interesting in the same way that Freakonomics made economics so fascinating.

This is a wonderful book. In 29 fascinating chapters, the author, an engineer, discusses issues as diverse as how to estimate the number of words one's vocabulary, to calculating how many flies it takes to pull a car, to how you can tell the weight of a bus just by looking at it, etc., etc. In each case, the author uses a very common-sense, step-by-step approach in which numbers are rounded and approximate answers are eventually obtained. He points out that many of the calculations are of a type that one can do in ones head while sitting on a deck chair with one's eyes closed - although, in many cases, some basic data or numbers or factors are needed to actually make the estimate. In my case, if I were doing such calculations from scratch, I would prefer having a basic calculator on hand - at least for some of them. The writing style is clear, accessible, friendly, authoritative and very engaging; but most of all, it is quite witty and occasionally very humorous. Because of the pleasant way in which this book is written, in combination with the information that it conveys, it can be enjoyed by absolutely anyone - math phobic or not.