Review of “Math Girls” by Hiroshi Yuki

When I have time to kill in a new library or bookstore, I inevitably find myself wandering to the math section — looking not for new textbooks but for decent books aimed at the popularization of mathematics. Sadly, the books I find are usually in one of three categories:

1. Drill books with hundreds of problems for young students to practice certain skills and procedures.
2. Cartoonish books aimed at a young elementary audience.
3. Fact books featuring short paragraphs on various topics in advanced mathematics.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with any of these types of books — and there’s a few that I could recommend from each category — but it’s rare to find a good math book that doesn’t fit one of these molds.

Enter Math Girls, by Hiroshi Yuki, which features conversations between high school students talk about love and talk about math. I won’t write a full review — the one at MAA Reviews does a really good job at describing the book, as well as the one published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society — but I will list some of the mathematical ideas that the book’s characters discuss:

1. Functions and finding patterns
2. The formula for the sum of the divisors of an integer.
3. DeMoivre’s Theorem.
4. Generating functions and the Fibonacci sequence.
5. The arithmetic-geometric mean inequality.
6. The binomial theorem.
7. The Catalan numbers.
8. The convergence and divergence of p-series
9. Taylor series
10. Vieta’s infinite product for (see Equation 22 from Mathworld)

What’s unique about Math Girls is that the logical development of all of these topics are present, as opposed a cursory summary typically found in a book of mathematical facts. That said, the logical development is not the clean and sanitized presentation that would be found in a textbook. Instead, the topics are presented as if the young characters were discovering them for themselves, with more than a few false starts and mistakes along the way. In other words, the book feels a bit like the work of real mathematicians, which makes it fairly unique for math books intended for a popular audience.

Again, I’ll defer to MAA Reviews. and the Notices of the AMS for anyone interested in a lengthier review of the book. There’s also a second volume (Math Girls 2: Fermat’s Last Theorem) that I haven’t read yet, but I presume that the style is very similar.