《几何学的力量》对大多数人来说，几何学是一门充斥着枯燥刻板习题的课程，高中一毕业，它就和你的牙套、你曾经追过的流行歌曲一起，被扔进了“故纸堆”。当提起几何学时，如果你首先想到的是如何通过一系列步骤证明关于三角形的某个显而易见的性质，那么这并不是几何学，而只是几何学的很小一部分。打个比方，三角形之于几何学，就好比一个动词之于一部精彩的小说。
这本书要讲述的几何学远不是初高中课本呈现的那样，《魔鬼数学》作者、数学家乔丹·艾伦伯格带领我们展开了一场海阔天空的探索之旅，旅程的终极意义是：通过发现几何学的力量，我们能够更好地思考每一个现实问题，重新认识我们身边的世界。
一根吸管有几个洞？尼姆游戏的必胜玩法是什么？数字货币交易中的公钥和私钥是怎么生成的？我们如何做才能阻止一场流行病肆虐世界？人工智能在学下国际象棋方面得心应手，而在学习朗读句子方面却力不从心，这是为什么？古希腊的黄金分割比能用来预测股票市场的走势吗？如果你的孩子真想学会思考的方法，他们应该在学校学些什么？所有这些问题都跟几何学有关，千真万确。
“几何学”一词的最初含义是“丈量世界”，但经过漫长的发展历程，它的含义包罗万象，可以解释世间万物的运行机制。在这本书中，几何学变得更贴近现代世界，它能够解答关于政治、社会、数据、技术、宇宙等领域的重要问题，与生活在“几何城市”中的我们息息相关。
打开这本书，你会在手不释卷的同时连连惊叹于几何学的伟大力量。
作者简介
乔丹·艾伦伯格
美国威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校数学教授，拥有哈佛大学数学博士学位，他的专业研究领域是数论和代数几何。他写作的数学文章常见于《石板》《华尔街日报》《纽约时报》《华盛顿邮报》《连线》等知名报刊，他的代表作是《魔鬼数学》。
For most of us, geometry is a subject filled with boring exercises that gets consigned to the "old paper pile" right out of high school, along with your braces and the pop songs you used to play. When you think of geometry, if the first thing you think of is how to prove some obvious property about triangles in a series of steps, then this is not geometry, but only a very small part of geometry. For example, triangles are to geometry what a verb is to a good novel.
Far from the geometry presented in middle school and high school textbooks, mathematician Jordan Ellenberg, author of "Devil's Math," takes us on a journey of exploration that ultimately means that by discovering the power of geometry, we can think better about every real problem and re-understand the world around us.
How many holes does a straw have? What is the must-win game of Nim? How are public and private keys generated in digital currency transactions? What can we do to stop a pandemic from ravaging the world? Why is AI so good at learning to play chess but so bad at learning to read sentences? Can the ancient Greek Golden ratio predict the movement of the stock market? If your child really wants to learn how to think, what should they learn in school? All of these questions have to do with geometry, it's true.
The word "geometry" originally meant "the measurement of the world," but over the course of a long development, its meaning has become all-encompassing and can explain how everything works. In this book, geometry becomes more relevant to the modern world, and it can answer important questions about politics, society, data, technology, the universe, and more, which are relevant to us living in "geometric cities."
When you open this book, you will be amazed at the power of geometry.
About the author
Jordan Ellenberg
He is a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and holds a PhD in mathematics from Harvard University, where he specializes in number theory and algebraic geometry. His mathematical articles are often published in SLATE, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired and other well-known newspapers, and his representative work is the Devil's Mathematics.
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