Love Triangle

I enjoyed both of Matt Parker’s previous books Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension, which gets into maths beyond the third dimension and is kind of loopy, and Humble Pi, which is about the often hilarious things that happen when maths get misused. But it’s taken me a while to get around to this one; triangles just didn’t seem as if they could have that much depth of interest to them. Thankfully I’m always willing to admit when I’m wrong!

This was in fact a really fun read. I was definitely on team hexagon before reading but I think I might be swayed to team triangle by this book. I can always round up six triangles to make a hexagon after all. I tried to find some triangles to photograph the book with and found a surprising lack of them in my house - I eventually located some remnants of Christmas card making. Hexagons would only have been slightly easier because I could have opened a dozen board game boxes to find those; I conclude that more board games ought to feature triangular boards and grids.

The book is very accessible, you definitely don’t need a big maths background to read it (though it’s still fun even if you do). You’ll go from vaguely remembering that trigonometry was a thing to more or less understanding how Fourier transforms work without any of the trauma I encountered the first time I trod that path. This version is all entertainment and a lot of information comes along for the ride. Vintage computing also gets a good look in for fans of the Burroughs 220, the HP-9100A or the SNES.