Review of When Least is Best. How Mathematicians Discovered Many Clever Ways to Make Things as Small (or as Large) as Possible

摘要

There are two good things in History of Mathematics: History (because we like to hear about older times, it makes us feel better, cleverer, healthier, happier) and Mathematics (because it is the common language we have with people from the past, and because it's fun). But History of Mathematics can also be quite dry, for example in scholarly publications dealing with some unknown mathematician using obscure notations... Not in this book. The author describes a long series of problems together with their solutions (or solutions-wannabe). The common theme is optimization: minimize/maximize physical or abstract quantities, length, time, area, volume, cost, etc. Unlike history books, topics are zigzagging on the timeline (and that is good practice to keep the reader motivated). But between the lines you can feel a steady progress in concepts and methods. It is a long way from Polybius to dynamic programming, and one enjoys every step of it.