The Best Writing on Mathematics 2017

The most striking thing about this collection is how beautiful the writing is. The articles cover a wide variety of topics, with some biographical sketches, some math education, some philosophy, and a moderate amount of actual mathematics. I think there’s something here for everyone, but no one will like all the articles. There are nineteen articles, of which about fourteen (depending on how you categorize) appeared in scholarly journals or collections. So while most of them can be understood and enjoyed by the intelligent lay reader, that was usually not the original audience. This is the eighth annual edition in the series, all with the same editor.

My favorite articles: a sketch of Richard K. Guy’s life on the occasion of his hundredth birthday; an article encouraging children to count on their fingers (I still do this, I didn’t realize it was out of fashion); a very interesting speculation by Jeremy Gray on what would have happened if the Fields Medal had started 150 years ago instead of 80 (he thinks math was much poorer in talent back then, and it would have been hard to line up both judges and prizewinners); a thought-provoking article on using the catenary to find logarithms (this goes back to Leibniz), which leads to a consideration of why we consider some functions fundamental and others not; an interesting although inconclusive look at whether the human brain is Bayesian; and a wide-ranging look at how the science of prediction has changed over the years (how impressive are those political predictions, really?).

In addition to the articles, which are the main content, there are also 20 pages of citations for additional interesting articles, and a two-page survey of additional interesting books.

Allen Stenger is a math hobbyist and retired software developer. He is an editor of the Missouri Journal of Mathematical Sciences. His personal web page is allenstenger.com. His mathematical interests are number theory and classical analysis.