Changes

|title=Mathletics

|author=John D Barrow

|publisher=Vintage

|date=June 2013

|summary=Hit and miss collection of pieces could have been improved by losing half of them and doubling the length of the rest. Some interesting bits, though, possibly worht borrowing.

}}

As a sports fan and a maths teacher, I was thrilled to get the chance to read a book which claims to give us ''surprising and enlightening insights into the world of sports''. This is rather a frustrating read because it seems to have got the balance wrong in many cases. There are some chapters which are so short as to be barely worth reading – one merely points out that while humans can’t run as fast as cheetahs or perform gymnastics as amazing as that of a monkey, we’re better all-rounders than any other animal. This is true, but hardly seems worth wasting a page on, it’s so obvious. Then there are other chapters, like the interesting one detailing the points scoring system in the decathlon, which are good but could have been much better given more space. The decathlon one is a prime example of this – it’s five pages, so one of the book’s longer sections, but could surely have been excellent if it had gone into more detail. I can’t help thinking that dropping half of the sections and doubling the other half in length might have been the way to go here.