Ian Stewart is a mathematician and prolific author, having written over 40 books on all aspects of maths, as well as publishing several guides to the maths used in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, writing half a dozen textbooks for students, and co-authoring a couple of science fiction novels.

Stewart writes in a marvellously clear style but, more importantly, he is interesting: he sees the world in an interesting way, in a mathematical way, and manages to convey the wonder and strangeness and powerful insights which seeing the world in terms of patterns and shapes, numbers and maths, gives you.

He wants to help us see the world as a mathematician sees it, full of clues and information which can lead us to deeper and deeper appreciation of the patterns and harmonies all around us. It makes for a wonderfully illuminating read.

1. The Natural Order

Thus Stewart begins the book by describing just some of nature’s multitude of patterns: the regular movements of the stars in the night sky; the sixfold symmetry of snowflakes; the stripes of tigers and zebras; the recurring patterns of sand dunes; rainbows; the spiral of a snail’s shell; why nearly all flowers have petals arranged in one of the following numbers 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89; the regular patterns or ‘rhythms’ made by animals scuttling, walking, flying and swimming.

2. What Mathematics is For

Mathematics is brilliant at helping us to solve puzzles. It is a more or less systematic way of digging out the rules and structures that lie behind some observed pattern or regularity, and then using those rules and structures to explain what’s going on. (p.16)

Having gotten our attention, Stewart trots through the history of major mathematical discoveries including Kepler discovering that the planets move not in circles but in ellipses; the discovery that the nature of acceleration is ‘not a fundamental quality, but a rate of change’, then Newton and Leibniz inventing calculus to help us work outcomplex rates of change, and so on.

Two of the main things that maths are for are 1. providing the tools which let scientists understand what nature is doing 2. providing new theoretical questions for mathematicians to explore further. These are handy rules of thumb for distinguishing between, respectively, applied and pure mathematics.

Stewart mentions one of the oddities, paradoxes or thought-provoking things that crops up in many science books, which is the eerie way that good mathematics, mathematics well done, whatever its source and no matter how abstract its origin, eventually turns out to be useful, to be applicable to the real world, to explain some aspect of nature.

Many philosophers have wondered why. Is there a deep congruence between the human mind and the structure of the universe? Did God make the universe mathematically and implant an understanding of maths in us? Is the universe made of maths?

Stewart’s answer is simple and elegant: he thinks that nature exploits every pattern that there is, which is why we keep discovering patterns everywhere. We humans express these patterns in numbers, but nature doesn’t use numbers as such – she uses the patterns and shapes and possibilities which the numbers express or define.

Mendel noticing the numerical relationships with which characteristics of peas are expressed when they are crossbred. The double helix structure of DNA. Computer simulations of the evolution of the eye from an initial mutation creating a patch of skin cells sensitive to light, published by Daniel Nilsson and Susanne Pelger in 1994. Pattern appears wherever we look.

Resonance = the relationship between periodically moving bodies in which their cycles lock together so that they take up the same relative positions at regular intervals. The cycle time is the period of the system. The individual bodies have different periods. The moon’s rotational period is the same as its revolution around the earth, so there is a 1:1 resonance of its orbital and rotational periods.

Mathematics doesn’t just analyse, it can predict, predict how all kinds of systems will work, from the aerodynamics which keep planes flying, to the amount of fertiliser required to increase crop yield, to the complicated calculations which keep communications satellites in orbit round the earth and therefore sustain our internet and mobile phone networks.

Time lags The gap between a new mathematical idea being developed and its practical implementation can be a century or more: it was 17th century interest in the mathematics of vibrating violin strings which led, three hundred years later, to the invention of radio, radar and TV.

3. What Mathematics is About

The word ‘number’ does not have any immutable, God-given meaning. (p.42)

Numbers are the most prominent part of mathematics and everyone is taught arithmetic at school, but numbers are just one type of object that mathematics is interested in.

Stewart outlines the invention of whole numbers, and then of fractions. Some time in the Dark Ages the invention of 0. The invention of negative numbers, then of square roots. Irrational numbers. ‘Real’ numbers.

Whole numbers 1, 2, 3… are known as the natural numbers. If you include negative whole numbers, the series is known as integers. Positive and negative numbers taken together are known as rational numbers. Then there are real numbers and complex numbers. Five systems in total.

But maths is also about operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. And functions, also known as transformations, rules for transforming one mathematical object into another. Many of these processes can be thought of as things which help to create data structures.

Maths is like a landscape in which similar proofs and theories cluster together to create peaks and troughs.

4. The Constants of Change

Newton’s basic insight was that changes in nature can be described by mathematical processes. Stewart explains how detailed consideration of what happens to a cannonball fired out of a cannon helps us towards Newton’s fundamental law, that force = mass x acceleration.

Newton invented calculus to help work out solutions to moving bodies. Its two basic operations – integration and differentiation – mean that, given one element – force, mass or acceleration – you can work out the other two. Differentiation is the technique for finding rates of change; integration is the technique for ‘undoing’ the effect of differentiation in order to isolate out the initial variables.

Calculating rates of change is a crucial aspect of maths, engineering, cosmology and many other areas of science.

5. From Violins to Videos

He gives a fascinating historical recap of how initial investigations into the way a violin string vibrates gave rise to formulae and equations which turned out to be useful in mapping electricity and magnetism, which turned out to be aspects of the same fundamental force, electromagnetism. It was understanding this which underpinned the invention of radio, radar, TV etc and Stewart’s account describes the contributions made by Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Heinrich Hertz and Guglielmo Marconi.

Stewart makes the point that mathematical theory tends to start with the simple and immediate and grow ever-more complicated. This is because of a basic approach common in lots of mathematics which is that, you have to start somewhere.

6. Broken Symmetry

A symmetry of an object or system is any transformation that leaves it invariant. (p.87)

There are many types of symmetry. The most important ones are reflections, rotations and translations.

7. The Rhythm of Life

The nature of oscillation and Hopf bifurcation (if a simplified system wobbles, then so must the complex system it is derived from) leads into a discussion of how animals – specifically animals with legs – move, which turns out to be by staggered or syncopated oscillations, oscillations of muscles triggered by neural circuits in the brain.

This is a subject Stewart has written about elsewhere and is something of an expert on. Thus he tells us that the seven types of quadrupedal gait are: the trot, pace, bound, walk, rotary gallop, transverse gallop, and canter.

8. Do Dice Play God?

This chapter covers Stewart’s take on chaos theory.

Chaotic behaviour obeys deterministic laws, but is so irregular that to the untrained eye it looks pretty much random. Chaos is not complicated, patternless behaviour; it is much more subtle. Chaos is apparently complicated, apparently patternless behaviour that actually has a simple, deterministic explanation. (p.130)

19th century scientists thought that, if you knew the starting conditions, and then the rules governing any system, you could completely predict the outcomes. In the 1970s and 80s it became increasingly clear that this was wrong. It is impossible because you can never define the starting conditions with complete certainty.

Thus all real world behaviours are subject to ‘sensitivity to initial conditions’. From minuscule divergences at the starting point, cataclysmic differences may eventually emerge in mature systems.

Stewart goes on to explain the concept of ‘phase space’ developed by Henri Poincaré: this is an imaginary mathematical space that represents all possible motions in a given dynamic system. The phase space is the 3-D place in which you plot the behaviour in order to create the phase portrait. Instead of having to define a formula and worrying about identifying every number of the behaviour, the general shape can be determined.

Much use of phase portraits has shown that dynamic systems tend to have set shapes which emerge and which systems move towards. These are called attractors.

9. Drops, Dynamics and Daisies

The book ends by drawing some philosophical conclusions.

Chaos theory has all sorts of implications but the one Stewart closes on is this: the world is not chaotic; if anything, it is boringly predictable. And at the level of basic physics and maths, the laws which seem to underpin it are also schematic and simple. And yet, what we are only really beginning to appreciate is how complicated things are in the middle.

It is as if nature can only get from simple laws (like Newton’s incredibly simple law of thermodynamics) to fairly simple outcomes (the orbit of the planets) via almost incomprehensibly complex processes.

To end, Stewart gives us three examples of the way apparently ‘simple’ phenomena in nature derive from stupefying complexity:

• what exactly happens when a drop of water falls off a tap
• computer modelling of the growth of fox and rabbit populations
• why petals on flowers are arranged in numbers derived from the Fibonacci sequence

In all three cases the underlying principles seem to be resolvable into easily stated laws and functions – and in our everyday lives we see water dropping off taps or flowerheads all the time – and yet the intermediate steps between simple mathematical principles and real world embodiment turn out to be mind-bogglingly complex.

Coda: Morphomatics

Stewart ends the book with an epilogue speculating, hoping and wishing for a new kind of mathematics which incorporates chaos theory and the other elements he’s discussed – a theory and study of form, which takes everything we already know about mathematics and seeks to work out how the almost incomprehensible complexity we are discovering in nature gives rise to all the ‘simple’ patterns which we see around us. He calls it morphomatics.

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Related links

• The Beauty of Numbers in Nature: Mathematical Patterns and Principles from the Natural World on Amazon

Reviews of other science books

Chemistry

• The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements by Peter Atkins (1995)

Cosmology

• The Perfect Theory by Pedro G. Ferreira (2014)
• The Book of Universes by John D. Barrow (2011)
• The Origin Of The Universe: To the Edge of Space and Time by John D. Barrow (1994)
• The Last Three Minutes: Conjectures about the Ultimate Fate of the Universe by Paul Davies (1994)
• A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking (1988)
• The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle (1957)

The Environment

• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)
• The Sixth Extinction by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin (1995)

Genetics and life

• Life At The Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by J. Craig Venter (2013)
• What Is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology by Addy Pross (2012)
• Seven Clues to the Origin of Life by A.G. Cairns-Smith (1985)
• The Double Helix by James Watson (1968)

Human evolution

• The Origin of Our Species by Chris Stringer (2011)
• Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (1997)

Maths

• Alex’s Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos (2010)
• Nature’s Numbers: Discovering Order and Pattern in the Universe by Ian Stewart (1995)
• Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by John Allen Paulos (1988)
• A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper: Making Sense of the Numbers in the Headlines by John Allen Paulos (1995)

Particle physics

• Atomic by Jim Baggott (2009)

Psychology

• Tips For Trying To Think Less Irrationally
• Irrationality: The Enemy Within by Stuart Sutherland (1992)
• Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (1974)