Book Review: Power in Numbers

 Hello!

Apparently, I had more time for reading! Yay! I have enrolled myself again in online course (just one at time, lesson learned haha) and I had more time for creative thinking; more time for managing my social pages, and yes: more FREE LITERATURE READING!

So, this is one of the books I checked during this hottest-July-ever-recorded in Vancouver.

Power in Numbers: The Rebel Women of Mathematics

The author of this book is Talithia Williams. She holds a PhD in statistics, and in my opinion, she belongs as well to this squad of Rebel Women in Mathematics. Actually, I think every women in mathematics is rebel in a way. The often-seen norm in our society is not that women should be in the math sector. Women should be doctors, they should be teachers, but not mathematicians. I found myself somewhere in the middle with my math teaching profession; not rebel, but not either comforter. 

I found this book as a very powerful one. At least it moved my ground! And I was standing so still, and was reassured of my position. So what do I talk about? Let's go from the beginning.

Let's talk about formal content of the book. It consists of three parts: This book talks about women mathematicians through the history and in the modern-present times. Fan of the history, I was familiar with most of them; for example Sophie Germain from late XVII and early XVIII century, but these modern day women... I didn't know about them. Actually I didn't have any role model than my high school math teachers and university women math teachers. After reading this book,  maybe some 2-3 weeks I was really questioning my career path! In the book there are women who were not only math teacher, but math application's engineers. Moreover, the book is providing some details about their personal life as well. They were described as mothers, grandmothers and again as mathematicians. Oh I wish every every teenage girl could read this book. So, yeah, that happened; this book brought to my attention role-models!

Part I: The Pioneers

Part II: From Code Breaking to Rocket Science

Part III: Modern Math Mavens

In every part, there are couple of women mathematicians and their life paths discussed.

Pros and cons

So, yeah if you went through my text above, you can take away the pros: encouraging women to pursue their math careers, talking about the struggles and challenges some of these women have ben faced, and providing role models of women who managed to keep the balance between family life and careers.

And, now I have to mention two big cons, so soooryyy 

The first is the wrong information, or simply inacurate data. On page 177, the book shift us to some math theory (there are offered as a brief guidance or probably just to refresh/expand our knowledge on some topic), on infinity. Here the author mention Cantor. And no thank you and acknowledgment will be ever enough for Cantor's Set Theory. His theory paved the way of the modern 20th and now 21 math theory. And in this book... oh it's so sad it says: "seventeen-century German mathematician Georg Cantor! Nooo! How is that possible? Such a lovely book, such a nice print, hard cover, smooth colorful pages, and you see this non-sense! Really, was there someone so checked the history facts here? When you see something like this, then simply every year or data in the book became unreliable. I understand, we are humans, we do mistake, but maybe five of us wouldn't! SO, yeah, that's one thing.

And the other thing is the choice of pictures. The pics of the women, them with their families, them at work, that was all nice and relevant. But the buildings? The university building and some random building they have been linked to or visited in their life? I found that even distracting! Some of the picture were by no chance related to the text. In my opinion, they were pure distraction and were shifting reader's mind away from the topic. 

Recommendation

Do I recommend? YES! I would recommend this book (as I said before) to teenage girls mostly, then to teachers who should provide this book as a resource to their students, and finally probably it would be a nice and interesting reading to some sociologists and of course all interested in feminist movements and women rights. 

Thank you for reading this, I hope you will take some time to think about the challenges that women were facing and maybe are still facing in their goal to be mathematicians.

Bye, bye, see you soon and don't forget to try to stay cool 😀