Last but not least: About mathematical crochet adventures
Last weekend, Thebookseller.com once again awarded the Diagram Prize. The online bookstore awards this prize to the most bizarre book titles. This year, the honor went to Latvian mathematician Daina Taimina. She received the award for her fascinating treatise "Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes".
Anyone who thinks that crocheting has nothing to do with mathematics is wrong. Hyperbolic geometry is all about surfaces that are difficult to represent using conventional methods - unless you crochet them. Insanely promising! In any case, the bookseller is relieved that such a challenging work has won. Bookseller columnist Horace Bent already feared that in times of crisis, publishers would concentrate on book titles that sell particularly well - such as biographies of celebrities. Clearly, the competition has once again proven that the award-winning works - even if the focus is on the oddity - are always challenging reading material.
Here is a small selection of the titles that have won awards since 1978:
- 1983: The theory of longitudinal rolling
- 1996: Greek rural letter carriers and the numbers of their canceled postmarks
- 2004: Make your horse bombproof
- 2005: People who don't know they are dead: How they develop an affection for unsuspecting observers and what to do about it
