Eugenia Cheng

What is math? And how exactly does it work? In How to Bake Pi, math professor Eugenia Cheng provides and accessible introduction to the logic of mathematics-sprinkled throughout with recipes for everything from crispy duck to cornbread-that illustrates to the general listener the beauty of math. Rather than dwell on the math of our high school classes, with formulas to memorize an confusing symbols to decipher, Cheng takes us into a world of abstract...

A mathematician and scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago helps readers explore the concept of infinity through unique concepts including chessboards, a chicken-sandwich sandwich and the creation of infinite cookies from an infinite dough ball.

"Eugenia Cheng can't help thinking like a mathematician. She also can't help thinking like a woman. After all, she's both. But there seems like there must be a clear tension. She had to learn to be a mathematician, for one thing, and-in the popular imagination, anyway-mathematics seems very "male," the domain of individualistic geniuses with terrible social skills, pursuing university tenure and fame. Those traits, however, aren't really what it means...

"Where does math come from? From a textbook? From rules? From deduction? From logic? Not really, Eugenia Cheng writes in Is Math Real?: it comes from curiosity, from instinctive human curiosity, "from people not being satisfied with answers and always wanting to understand more." And most importantly, she says, "it comes from questions": not from answering them, but from posing them. Nothing could seem more at odds from the way most of us were taught...