The Wonder Book of Geometry: A Mathematical Story

by David Acheson

From Thales’s theorem to the Banach-Tarski paradox, Oxford mathematician David Acheson’s book, The Wonder Book of Geometry, is a lively attempt to bring to life geometry—literally, ‘earth measurement’—and make it accessible to the general public. It has a lot of illustrations, not just of triangles, but portraits of mathematicians (like Euclid of Alexandria), maps, early editions of books, news clippings, a Ming dynasty copy of an ancient Chinese text, even postage stamps. According to Acheson, he wrote the book “because I believe that geometry can offer the quickest route to the whole nature and spirit of mathematics at its best, at almost any age, provided the subject is presented with sufficient imagination.”