The Dot and the Line

"The Dot and the Line is another book that had a lot of personal meaning to me. My parents gave it to me when I was about nine years old. It’s a simple story about a romance between a dot and a line, and a way of teaching some mathematical concepts to kids without them even realising it. The line is trying to impress this dot, and the dot is bored by him because he is too straight. She is in love with a squiggle. The line wants to impress her, and so he works and works and finally learns to bend himself and he makes an angle. In the process you are learning a mathematical term, about angles. Then he starts making fancier and fancier shapes and you learn some more mathematical terms like polygons and parallelograms. Finally he starts making curves and – well, I don’t want to give away too much of the plot. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter What makes the book stunning are the exquisite pictures of what he is doing. Many of them are mathematical, but when you are nine years old you don’t even realise you are learning maths. You are just seeing fascinating pictures, and learning mathematics through beauty. That is what makes it wonderful. Yes, she leaves the squiggle behind. Reading it now, I have mixed feelings about it because I kind of sympathise with the squiggle! But Norton Juster – who is better known for another children’s book, The Phantom Tollbooth – had a keen sense of the mathematical aesthetic, that there is beauty in patterns. And these patterns make you want to find out what is behind them. Yes, one of the key messages I was trying to get across in that book is that mathematics can be beautiful. I give the history of 24 of what I think are the most beautiful equations. I try to explain what they mean and also why they are beautiful, as well as important. I think the production of the book is absolutely lovely. I have had so many friends tell me that they didn’t expect it to be so beautiful to look at. I can only claim a tiny amount of credit for that. Most of the credit goes to the co-publishers of the book. But one thing I did contribute to was the idea of putting each of the equations into calligraphy. I hope this sends a subliminal message to the reader that I really treasure these formulas, and I think that they should be part of our cultural heritage, just like paintings or sculptures."