Hiatus and Iguanas

I have been quite busy lately with school work and an increased demand for high school tutoring, so I have not updated my blog much recently. I finally am beginning, after the disaster of last weekend, to settle into a schedule for myself and my work, while immense, is actually manageable if I properly allot my time. I haven't been baking bread recently. Last weekend I put three loaves of bread in the freezer and we have been thawing and eating those. If the loaves are wrapped tightly enough they seem to fare pretty well in the freezer, actually, which is fabulous. Back to bread baking soon.

I attempt, for the most part, to remain fairly unpolitical on this blog because I tend to find people who proselytize on the internet to be annoying irrespective of whether I agree with them. However, I happened upon this article from Balkinization today and I thought it was quite well constructed. In the spirit of my usual blogging, I will let the article speak for itself.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone.

One of Those Days...

It's just been one of those days where nothing goes as planned. It seems to be some kind of math curse. I studied for the exam for the whole weekend. I made a study guide and did practice problems of each of the ypes that my professor enumerated were on the exam. Unfortunately, I was deceived. At least three of of the 13 questions on the exam were of a sort I had never seen. It was one of those days.

I think I will go back over the math. I have books that will take me up through multivariable calculus. It may be harder to teach myself, but at least I will know when I know the information and I cannot get blindsided by an exam that makes no sense. Ultimately, I am learning for my own sake anyway, so there is little downside to teaching myself.

I had a lovely dinner of samosa's my mother bought. I will resume bread baking tomorrow...

Teaching through the Invisible Wall (revisited)

A while ago, I wrote a blogpost called "Teaching though the Invisible Wall" which talked about my problems relating to my students. Having taught a few more groups of students, I have a slightly different perspective on how to relate to students.

My problems in "Teaching though the Invisible Wall": I was wondering whether it was the position of authority that barred me from my attempts to be accessible to the students. I tried to do those things that I wanted my teachers to do, such as eliminate silly games and focusing the techniques that were the most reliable. It did not seem to help.

This current class is different. They are eccentric: smart, diverse, and often sleep-deprived. Perhaps the members of this class are more like me than my previous classes. They seem to like me. At the beginning of the class, a few of the students seemed to think I could not be particularly intelligent because I was teaching SAT preparation. However, one of the students who so clearly looked a little askance at me the first day actually asked me why I was not a "real teacher" in a way that implied that it I was good enough to be whatever it was he deemed a "real teacher" to be. Maybe I have changed my style or grown acclimatized to students without realizing it.

Another possibility is that I have changed my style. I do not compare myself and my applications to those of my students, but I rather try to remember the things that they talk of so I can ask after them. Maybe it is not for a teacher to say "I know the stresses of being a student" but rather "your life is of interest." I am not sure. Perhaps the next class will prove some kind of a test case.

The Digital Age: Internet Access and Education

This title is more abstract and promising than my actual thoughts at the moment. I have been having a lot of trouble with my internet access, so posting may be spotty over the next couple of days. However, I have been reading some interesting thoughts on education.

When I finished Phrasikleia while I was proctoring an exam on Sunday, I began reading a free kindle book that I downloaded called The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age. The book is a study of sorts, done with collaboration from UC Berkley and Duke and I think published by MIT that discusses the nature of education in an era of participatory technology. The study itself was placed on a website for a year where readers could leave comments, and many of these suggestions were incorporated into the document itself.

I have really enjoyed the study thus far. It notes that although there is a significant amount of participatory technology available and some of it has been put to educational use (like wikipedia), teachers and institutions are still focusing on the top-down form of IT (information technology) rather than the participatory technology platforms.

I think this educational dilemma is very interesting. There is obviously a lot of value in a top-down system of learning, but as the study points out the US has a ridiculously high dropout rate and perhaps some of the participatory technology (often not accessible to the type of low-income students who drop out of school due to lack of computer and internet resources) could be incorporated into the educational system to help update it and increase graduation rates.

Some of these ideas about participatory technology are already being employed by educators such as Sugata Mitra (see my blogposts on his TED talk: #1, #2). I also discuss some of them in my blogpost on textbooks and opencourseware. I am excited to read the rest of the study and see where it goes.

Moving with Dogs and Other Random Thoughts

I recently returned from my Alma Mater and taught my first of the new session of SAT prep classes. I really like this new class and I am very excited. On a slightly unrelated note, one of my students told me I look like Emily Mortimer, which was extremely flattering and totally random.

Emily Mortimer [1]

Anyway, sadly I have a cold. I have spent most of the day catching up with friends and being lazy. My mother sent me this comic on Moving with Dogs to read. Most of the rest of this blog is kind of dark and creepy, but this particular one was really funny.

Endnotes

1. From Google images from this website.

On My Way Home...

I had a lovely trip back to my Alma Mater. I am so incredibly proud of the friends of mine who finished their theses this semester. It was a lovely and wonderful weekend.

I am resuming my teaching tomorrow. It's a new class so there will be new fabulous moments and challenges. I am excited to continue working on my teaching skills because those communication skills are vastly important for every part of my life, and the ability to impart knowledge will come in handy in graduate school and in my life as a professor.

Teaching Well: An Art or Science?

I read an article a few mornings ago in the New York Times. The article was by Thomas Friedman on the crisis state of education in the United States. I found myself agreeing easily with the first half of the article. He contends that to close the achievement gap, students must learn "he ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate" (article). After this point, however, I found myself extremely bothered by the rest of his perspective, specifically two major pieces:

First, Thomas Friedman's proposed solution, that he claims has worked in some European countries is selecting only teachers from the top third of their graduating class. Intuitively this sounds good: smart teachers inspire smart students. Yet, if you think about this for a second, this rings false. Teaching SAT prep, I have realized that being smart and having the right answers is extremely important, but wins little ground in ensuring that students want to be there and that they sit down and absorb the information. What a teacher needs is enthusiasm for the subject, energy, charisma, patience, empathy, and serious critical thinking skills in order to ensure that (s)he can constantly engage the students' interest. None of these things can be measured in college grades.

Two anecdotes illustrate this point. One of my favorite teachers in high school was an English teacher that I had. He started off as a library assistant at the school, who sometimes substituted for different classes, and he was so well liked, the administration gave him a teaching position. He was well-read, eloquent, spoke at least three foreign languages, and was clearly intelligent. From a stray comment here or there, I had the feeling that he may not have graduated in the top third of his college class-- or maybe just barely. After college, he apprenticed as a stone mason in Italy and worked as one in the US for a while before deciding he wanted to teach. What made him beloved was his passion for literature and language and the fact that his experience was not limited to the books that he taught. He endeavored, above all to make students as enamored with the subject as he was. My second example is of a physics professor from my alma mater. Some years ago, he had been a student at my alma mater and was reputedly one of the most intelligent physics students we had with a GPA near if not at the top of his graduating class. Although students generally liked him because he was a nice, intelligent guy, a constant criticism that I heard from my physics-major friends was that "he doesn't understand that just because it was easy for him when he went here that it does not mean it's easy for us." Since he extremely intelligent but without proper empathy, he undertaught the material, assigned too much homework, and made his students feel inadequate. Even Cerinthus, who ended up with a very high score in this professor's class, constantly complained that the professor just did not understand how much work he was assigning and how he simply did not realize that his students could not absorb information as quickly as he did.

My point with these two anecdotes is obviously not to entirely disprove Friedman's solution, it is simply to demonstrate that there are problems with the idea that teaching well and having students enjoy their education can not be solved with numbers and figures (like only selecting teachers from the top 33% of the class). There must be other ways of enticing good teachers, such as paying off the student loans of those who become teachers or helping pay for PhD programs. I'm not sure. I just cannot believe that selecting teachers by statistics, rather than those characteristics I mentioned earlier, will not lead to a better school system.

Second, I was shocked to find that Friedman does not speak at all about the crisis of the humanities so frequently discussed by academics in the paper over the past few months. Although the sciences can certainly help students with critical thinking, and in some cased with collaboration, effective communication skills come from humanities (as well as humanities also furnishing critical thinking and often collaborative skills). If teachers have not been educated in the humanities themselves, they cannot effectively impart these skills to their students. An article I read back in September lends credence to this point. The article uses the example of a Massachusetts school which integrated humanities-style writing into every class in the entire curriculum, including math and science. The result was "In 2001 testing, more students passed the state tests after failing the year before than at any other school in Massachusetts. The gains continued. This year and last, Brockton outperformed 90 percent of Massachusetts high schools" (article). I could not believe that Friedman would neglect such an important issue.

Cerinthus Reports: The Secret Bakery

It has been a very long weekend so far. I spent 7 hours today teaching a mixed class of 6th graders and high school sophomores algebra and English. It was a long day. However, I shall write a short "Cerinthus Reports" and get back to more substantive posting tomorrow.

Sulpicia asks: are there any interesting quirks of nightlife in Florence?

Cerinthus answers: I really want to try one of Florence's secret bakeries.
This, of course, prompted me to ask, "isn't being a secret bakery a bad marketing strategy?" Apparently, there is some rule in Florence that food cannot be sold-- or maybe it is hot food cannot be sold-- after around 11pm. Secret bakeries fill this gap. They function illegally between around midnight and 4am or so. Apparently, a person finds the unmarked door and knocks. They then specify whether they want a pastry or bread. The door closes and opens again to exchange the item for the money.

The whole thing sounds pretty sketchy to me, but it also sounds like a wonderful quirk of Florence. I think I may have to try one when I some day get there?

Teaching through the Invisible Wall

I proctored another practice test today. Practice tests are a long four hours and I finished Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy and was able to cross it off of my reading list [1]. I also read two other works which I will discuss in detail over the next few days.

At one of the five-minute breaks in the four-hour exam, I asked my students how their college applications were going. People were nervous-- and rightfully so-- but were in the process. I told them that I was doing graduate school applications, and they were a nightmare because they do not have a common application and require a lot of strange GPA manipulations (depending upon whether the school is focused on your grades in courses in your major, in your last two years, etc). After explaining this, I realized that this attempt to explain my sympathies with the students' situation was precisely the wrong approach. They do not want to hear how hard my experience is-- or the things that may be awaiting them after college-- but rather they would like some encouraging words.

I always thought, while I was in high school, that when I became a teacher (I wanted to be a professor of course, but I figured that it was a similar principle) that I would understand the plight of the student and not be alienated from it in the way that my teachers seemed to be. My specific specific qualms were with busy-work, "creative projects" as graded material, and improper balancing of review and new material (in either direction). Now, I realize that there is as much of an invisible wall between my students and me as there was between me and my teachers. Maybe it is the inevitable position of being a teacher.

One thing that cheered me up was an essay that a student wrote today. The topic asked the students to consider what type of learning should be done in schools. One of the girls related a personal anecdote about a friend of hers sitting at lunch one day and complaining that school did not have enough breaks and did not incorporate enough creative learning. The girl questioned her friend, and through questioning the friend agreed that although it might feel that way, but the purpose of school was to provide a learning experience and that it was ultimately useful. I do not know if the anecdote was true, but it made me feel a little bit better.

Endnotes

1. Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy is fabulous. Andrea Nightingale utilizes a mixture of history and classical scholarship with Bahktin and a smattering of literary theory to provide an energetically written and scholastically footnoted work that provides a fascinating analysis of Plato and the development of philosophy as a genre. I will do a full review soon.

 

The Problems with Free Books

This morning, my mother emailed me a thoroughly amusing article called "The Trouble with Google Books." The article deals with the errors and problems that Google books has, specifically with metadata (i.e. the data that allows you to find the book you are looking for, e.g. publication date, author, etc). Some of the pieces are particularly hilarious, such as attributing a book an the Mosiac Web browser to Sigmund Freud's distinguished co-authorship [1]. My biggest problem with google books was that it always omitted exactly those pages of a book that I needed most when I looked something up because some other enterprising classicist had checked it out of the library before I got there [2].

Although I have always been a massive lover of cheap books and used books (which is the only way I could have amassed the massive collection of books around my house and in boxes in the garage), receiving a Kindle (see my previous blogpost) I have become a zealot for free electronic books. Part of the time while Cerinthus was visiting, I stupidly spent showing him the wonders of ACLS Humanities E-Book Archive (because he still has access to our college's server). It is incredible. Although one can only download PDF pages in three pages bursts, there are some fabulous academic texts on every subject from archaeoastronomy to modern urban planning. If one compiles the books oneself, they're free (provided, of course, access to said archive through school or an academic institution). I also have spent a lot of time searching for books, especially classics books and found a number of different places (to many of which I link on Platonic Psychology). Some interesting ones are as follows:

• Project Gutenberg: An archive of out of print books and audiobooks. Has a pretty awesome variety of formats available, including MOBI documents for the kindle. They are now also compiling audiobooks, as well as adding works in their original languages, such as Greek and Latin (as well as German, French, etc)
• Internet Archive: Very much like Project Gutenberg, this archive includes a variety of out of print books in many different formats, including the Sanskrit Grammar that I included in my blogpost last night.
• Textkit: A selections of out of print materials for teaching Classical Greek and Latin.
• Free Books from Amazon: this is all in kindle format (but can be read with free kindle reading apps), but it includes out of print books, as well as government documents like the U.S. Budget, and a number of new studies on digital media and learning by MIT, like this one.
  

There are some more but this is a start and I would love to hear about more I have not found yet.

Harping on my education theme, again (sorry!), I think cheap used books and free ebooks are awesome. I believe, most certainly, that authors and the institutions who aid in dissemination their work should be paid and that they provide a vital service for society. However, the library near my house has a book section only twice the size of my bedroom. Thus far, I found no classics texts there I am interested in reading. The books are simply too expensive for a small local library. It seems to me that libraries are one of the great places that one can supplement or design their own education. It makes no sense that only university libraries have the necessary academic texts when cities and towns without universities are the ones could most use an extensive library. So I think that used book sites and free ebooks are great because they provide access to a whole range of materials not otherwise available.

Endnotes

1. This reminded me of when I asked a group of my SAT kids what they knew about Charles Dickens' writing, and I got three blank stares and a girl who told me that she had only read half of Alice in Wonderland and did not remember it very well. I was also shocked to learn that out of a 13 person class, not one person knew who Adam Smith was. On the other hand, every one of them can work a smartphone, an art which I have not yet mastered.
2. My junior year this was a particularly pernicious trend, which prevented me from ever getting a chance to read Genres in Dialogue for my Phaedrus paper. Luckily, I received a copy for my last birthday and I am enjoying it thoroughly.

Unconventional Education #2

Two of the reasons that I was so interested in Sugata Mitra's [1] TED Talk in my last blogpost are that I am now working as an educator and that I am a product of progressive education (in my formative elementary school years). From this, I understand the power of working in groups and students teaching themselves and each other.

I went to a progressive elementary school that was built on John Dewey's conception of experimental learning. We spent most of our time in school working in groups, block building, and wood working. We went on field trips to the source of each of the sites that we were studying. I remember vividly sitting through mass at a modern monastery when studying the life of medieval monks and getting up at 3am to go to one of the groups of vendors that supplies restaurants in order to see how the city worked. I gained a curiosity and a passion for learning there.


I picked the college that I did partially on the idea that it would be a return to these unconventional roots. Although it had grades, classes, and majors, like any traditional institution, there was a high premium put on working in groups for certain classes as well as an encouragement for self-competition rather than interpersonal competition. This was a lovely change from my traditional high school, and it fostered precisely the intellectual environment that I craved. In my senior year, I started a Heidegger seminar which met on Friday nights to discuss Being and Time. This class utilized a combination of technology (sometimes listening to Hubert Dryfus' lectures from his Philosophy 185 class, as well as individual in the group finding things online), and group work (the discussions every week) allowed us to gain an incredible amount of information out of the text. Emergence, in Mitra's words. We had very little outside intervention, except for a few visits from a wonderful German professor. I unfortunately was not able to read and participate in this as much as possible due to writing my thesis, but the Heidegger group was productive and wonderful and it was one of the great parts of my education.

The SAT prep that I teach involves some amount of group work in each class. Although often times the group work devolves into talking. The students in my class are tense about school, sports, and college applications, and many of them go to school together. However, the other day I witnessed a great moment. Two of the girls in my class, who have the most trouble with math were working together. One of the smartest, but also one of the tougher girls in my class, ended up in a group with them. When I came over to check on the group, she was helping them-- really explaining carefully how each of the math problems worked and encouraging them. I did not even have to help them out and I was able to focus on some of the other groups that were having trouble focusing. It underlined, for me, the true value of working together.

In some ways, that this self-generated learning is what I am trying to do this year. I am attempting to channel my curiosity in a way to further my own education and solidify those things I learned in the past in my mind. I am not, unfortunately, in a group of any kind (although there is an advanced calculus class at a local school I would absolutely love to take), but I am using the internet, the books I have around, and material from my old courses in order to try to create my own education. Part of the reason I write Platonic Psychology is that I provide a collection of resources for anyone who is out there looking, but more to provide me with a hypothetical group with whom I can interact. By articulating my thoughts to these theoretical people, I solidify my thoughts and allow them to grow (and hopefully generate emergence). So hopefully it will all work out.

Endnotes

1. I just discovered his blog and found it to be thoroughly charming.

Unconventional Education

My mother just sent me an incredible video. I'm not, generally speaking, one of those people who watches a lot of videos online, but this was so stunning that I had to share it. This video is from a TED conference, in which Sugata Mitra discusses the use of computers in child-driven education. The initial premise that he poses is that the places in the world to which good teachers cannot or will not go are not only the places that need them the most, but also the places that become the hotbeds of problems in the world. From there, he started an experiment by placing computers in slums in order to see if children could learn from them without instruction.

Mitra poses this hypothesis at the end of the talk, which he intends upon proving experimentally in the next five years:

"Education is a self-organizing system [1] where learning is an emergent phenomenon [2]."

This video is fantastic and I highly recommend it.

Endnotes

1. Mitra defines a self-organizing system as "one where the system structure appears without explicit intervention from outside the system."
2. Mitra defines emergence as "the appearance of a property not previously observed as a functional characteristic of the system."

Circumnavigating the Wall: Astrophysics, Cosmology, and Multivariable Calculus

From the time I was 10 or so I wanted to become an astrophysicist. I fell in love with looking at and reading about the solar system when I was four, but that was followed by a brief period where I wanted to join the CDC. By the time I was 13 I was voraciously reading any book I could understand about cosmology and quantum mechanics.

One summer, I did a program at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, One of the books that was assigned to me (that I never got around to reading) was the Archives of the Universe.

The book looks fabulous. It teaches about the history of astronomy through compiling selection from the revolutionary texts that changed the history of astronomy and the way that humankind views the universe. I did try to read it before, but I am embarrassed to say I had some difficulty with visualizing some of the mathematical moves made in Chapter 4: Measuring the Earth's Circumference. Recently I asked Cerinthus if he would read it with me, but unfortunately he had to leave for his adventure before we got the chance. The book is currently on my reading list, but I am not sure how long it will be before I get to it.

This image was taken by Alan, the leader of my summer program at PARI.

Teaching my SAT class reminds me how much I love theoretical math and science. Although I cannot get enough of both classics and the friends I made studying it, I sometimes wonder whether I should have continued down the other path. I just had trouble tolerating the way that Physics 100 was taught. I know that mechanics are radically important to physics, but I wanted to learn about the interactions of stars and galaxies, not the movement of a piece of wood attached to a spring. The only part of college physics that I really enjoyed was Special Relativity.

I also hit a wall in math. Although I took Introduction to Real Analysis and Introduction to Number Theory, both of which I adored, I could not understand my professor in Multivariable Calculus. I found single variable calculus in high school to be a breeze and it really made me love math. I recommend taking calculus to all of my students because it is such a fascinating subject. But I do not know whether it was my book or my professor, but I remember not being able to understand anything at all in my multivariable class and eventually dropped it. I plan on teaching myself both more math and more physics (and I would love book/website/etc recommendations, if anyone has any), but I sometimes long for a way to break back into the world of math and science.

Trying Not to Procrastinate

I have wasted a lot of time this summer. A lot of the time I think I am looking for direction. I was always a self-starter, but I had a lot of trouble finishing projects. Part of this comes from my visual processing disorder [1],which make it difficult to take in visual input for any period of time without taking adequate breaks.[2] Earlier this summer, however, my self-starter instinct seemed to have died. I constantly put books down after a few minute or pages, I spend hours watching inane television instead of getting to the books and articles I desperately wanted to read, I always came back to the same set of flashcards because I never used them consistently enough to lodge the words in my memory, etc.

When Cerinthus was here I was in the worst of my rut. I spent a large amount of time downloading books off the internet when I should have been spending time with him or even just reading one of the books I had downloaded. Then, to make matters worse, I came down with a horrible flu, which made me feel like I was looking at the world through a thick veil of incomprehension and I could not concentrate on anything.

It seems that I have finally managed to turn things around. Yesterday was my first day back at the gym. Finally I finished the first book on my reading list, Oswyn Murray's Early Greece. I plan on starting my next book tomorrow. On Saturday I proctor my next exam, so I need something to keep me occupied. I found The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100-480 B.C. by Jeffery Hurwit in my garage today; it is one of the many books I still have not managed to unpack and bring upstairs. Since I plan to expand the second chapter of my thesis based on some encouraging data in Early Greece, I thought that Hurwit's book might provide even more fodder for my rewriting.






While I was reading Early Greece, I became so excited by different piece of Greek history that I had missed in my attempt to balance the academics of school and my personal life and health that I blogged about it. I have written two installments so far, Greek History Review #1 and #2 and my plan is to finish my third installment tomorrow which will be able to be found at my Platonic Psychology blog. I find that it is easier to remember the facts that I read when I write about them and I am more likely to put pen to paper (or in this case, finger to keyboard) when my writing is "published," insofar as blogging is publishing. I especially like it when I can add awesome pictures (see Greek History Review #2).

Endnotes

1.  Basic information about visual processing disorders can be found at LDonline.
2. For this reason, visual processing difficulties are often confused with ADHD. 

The Summer Flu and Indian Food

On Thursday I came down with the flu. Every morning I wake up feeling better, and every morning, an hour later, I feel like I've been run over by a train and spend the rest of the day trying to recover. My fever shot up today and i had to warn my boss I might not be able to make it to work tomorrow. It's terrible. I've spent all day-- my worst day so far-- in bed watching bad movies.

I feel truly terrible. Cerinthus is here for the last time before he goes to Europe for six months and I'm languishing in ill health while hes watches bad movies and plays computer games. What unfortunate timing.

One of the wonderful things that Cerinthus has done to take care of me was to order take out from our favorite Indian Place, Clay Oven. I got the extra spicy Chicken Tikka Masala, which helped my sinuses to drain and made me feel much better than I would have without it. It was wonderful. Garlic naan dipped in sauce that burns off the roof of one's mouth. It was perfect. I was alive again for about half an hour and then back to being a wraith.

Beside the inane movies that we have been watching, we have also been watching Sherlock with my parents. Sherlock is a new British series that does a modern updating of Sherlock Holmes. I am no particular fan of Sherlock Holmes on principle. The first episode of this show was awesome. Holmes is an obsessive high-functioning sociopath. He is unempathetic, erudite, charming, and brilliant-- but he's totally cold. Dr. John Watson is warm,  charming, and is a soldier at heart who cannot stay away from a thrill or danger. He breathes warmth and levity into the buddy duo that is the lifeblood of the show. I do, generally, have a (particularly unfortunate) penchant for the sociopathic genius, but in this case it's the duo that is bewitchingly charming. I guess it shows my own personal growth. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the characters between the first and second episodes. However, the third episode might be a little brighter.

Getting Paid to Read for Fun

I've been getting pretty behind on my reading, as is obvious from the dearth of books crossed off my reading list. This lack of progress comes from a combination of a number of factors. I have been busy preparing for teaching my own class at work. Cerinthus is here, which has impeded my progress. However, I would not give up having him here, especially since I will not be able to see him for another six months. Currently, I seem to have contracted a cold, which has been making me pretty lethargic and unable to think clearly enough to read some of the texts on my list.

Although I was sick yesterday, I had to proctor an exam. To begin with, I had to grade essays. The essays were of better quality than I was expecting. Some of the kids I'm teaching have the promise of being very intelligent and doing very well. I hope that I can help to guide them there. The rest of the time while I'm proctoring the exam, I am free to do as I please, provided that I make sure no one is cheating and that I call the time properly and read the script.

My most recent reading.

During this last session, I read How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space by Janna Levin. The book is a wonderful fusion between the personal life of a mathematician/cosmologist, the history of math, and lessons in cosmology and mathematical topology. Although the topics in the math are complex, they are explained clearly and deftly, as well as peppered with personal details that keep the reader engaged and never overwhelmed by the complex concepts. I highly recommend this to everyone with any interest in math or science.

In the book, Janna Levin comes across as an sweet, passionate, obsessive, quirky individual with sharp sense of humor and an easy, approachable writing style. She speaks of the loneliness that comes from working in mathematics-- at least the theoretical mathematics of academia. This worries me. Although I am a classicist now, theoretical math and physics was always my first love, my first passion. Some days I have dreams of going back there. Her book makes it seem as though the work is lonely but rewarding, but a living nightmare for the spouses/boyfriends/girlfriends/partners of the mathematician. Is classics going to be like this too? Am I going to ruin the life of Cerinthus and drive his career into the ground because I want to pursue a life in academia? I hope not.