Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

THE CALCULUS DIARIES

Jennifer Ouellette

How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse

One woman's quest to understand the math behind her daily life and the reader learns with her, tracing her progression from self-professed amateur to savvy mathematician.

Jennifer Ouellette never took math in college, mostly because she - like most people - assumed that she wouldn't need it in real life. But then the English-major-turned-award-winning-science-writer had a change of heart and decided to revisit the equations and formulas that had haunted her for years.
The Calculus Diaries is the fun and fascinating account of her year spent confronting her math phobia head on. With wit and verve, Ouellette shows how she learned to apply calculus to everything from gas mileage to dieting, from the rides at Disneyland to shooting craps in Vegas -proving that even the mathematically challenged can learn the fundamentals of the universal language.

Jennifer Ouellette is the author of The Physics of the Buffyverse (2007) and Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics (2006). Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Discover, Salon, Nature, New Scientist, Physics Today, Symmetry, and Physics World, among other venues. She maintains a general science-and-culture group blog called Cocktail Party Physics, and blogs for Discovery News. In November 2008, Ouellette became director of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, a program of the National Academy of Sciences aimed at fostering creative collaborations between scientists and entertainment industry pro- fessionals. In spring 2008, she was Journalist in Residence at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. Ouellette holds a black belt in jujitsu, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll.

Available products
Book Published 2010-08-01 by Penguin Original
Book Published 2010-08-01 by Penguin Original

Comments

As amusing as it is enlightening, The Calculus Diaries is no dry survey of abstractions. It's a guide to everyday life -- to car trips and roller- coaster rides, diet and exercise, mortgages and the housing bubble, even social networking. As Ouellette modestly recounts her own learning curve, she and her husband become characters alongside eccentrics such as Newton and Gaudi and William the Conqueror. Like a great dance teacher, Ouellette steers us so gently we think we're gliding along on our own.

I haven't had this much fun learning math since I watched The Count on 'Sesame Street' when I was three. And the Count never talked about log flumes or zombies. So The Calculus Diaries wins the day.

Back in the day, when I was close to flunking out of calculus class because I couldn't understand why it was worth my valuable time to actually understand it, I needed someone like Jennifer Ouellette to gently explain how I wrong I was. She's like every English major's dream math teacher: funny, smart, infected with communicable enthusiasm, and she can rock a Buffy reference. In this book, she hastens the day when more people are familiar with an integral function than with Justin Bieber.

If, like me, you love the neatness of calculus but never appreciated its applications or the colourful characters who have used it through history, then these diaries are well worth a read.

The Calculus Diaries is a great primer for anyone who needs to get over their heebie-jeebies about an upcoming calculus class, or for anyone who's ever wondered how calculus fits into everyday life and wants to be entertained, too!

Jennifer Ouellette's calculus confessional is a delight, and an example of the finest kind of science writing. Her book reveals to its readers the gritty inner workings of the most important idea humans have ever thought. (Yes, calculus is that big: it's all about understanding how things change in space and time, and there just isn't much more important than that.) Ouellette's wit, her elegant wielding of metaphor, and her passion for both math and funky culture produce this crucial insight: every equation tells a story, she says, and she's right, and the tales she tells here will captivate even the most math-phobic.