Nature's Numbers

A mathematical sightseeing tour of the natural world from the author of THE MAGICAL MAZE

Why do many flowers have five or eight petals, but very few six or seven? Why do snowflakes have sixfold symmetry? Why do tigers have stripes but leopards have spots?

Mathematics is to nature as Sherlock Holmes is to evidence. Mathematics can look at a single snowflake and deduce the atomic geometry of its crystals; it can start with a violin string and uncover the existence of radio waves. And mathematics still has the power to open our eyes to new and unsuspected regularities - the secret structure of a cloud or the hidden rhythms of the weather. There are patterns in the world we are now seeing for the first time - patterns at the frontier of science, yet patterns so simple that anybody can see them once they know where to look.

Ian Stewart was born in 1945, educated at Cambridge (MA) and Warwick (PhD). He has five honorary doctorates (Open University, Westminster, Louvain, Kingston, and Brighton) and is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University. He has published over 120 books including Mathematics of Life, Professor Stewart’s Hoard of Mathematical Treasures, Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, Why Beauty is Truth, Flatterland, What Shape is a Snowflake?, Nature’s Numbers, Does God Play Dice?, and the bestselling series The Science of Discworld I, II, III, and IV with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen.

His awards include the Royal Society’s Faraday Medal, the Gold Medal of the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, the Public Understanding of Science Award of the AAAS, and the LMS/IMA Zeeman Medal. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001 and currently serves on Council, its governing body. His Letters to a Young Mathematician won the Peano Prize and The Symmetry Perspective won the Balaguer Prize. His app Incredible Numbers (Profile and TouchPress) wont the Digital Book World award for adult nonfiction, and he shared the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science with Steven Strogatz in 2015.

He has also written two science fiction novels Wheelers and Heaven with Jack Cohen. He makes frequent radio and television appearances, including the 1997 Christmas Lectures. He is an active research mathematician with 198 published papers, and works on pattern formation, chaos, network dynamics, and biomathematics.