The Everyday Maths

by Liat Berdugo

"Liat is a master of the non-sequitur, knowing just how to put two completely unconnected statements together in a way that reveals their complete affinity. Inventive, humorous, and very, very smart, this is a book truly like no other—and a sheer delight."

—Cole Swensen

Liat Berdugo, mathematician and artist, collects and reinterprets mathematical diagrams. Funny, dark, surprising, and revelatory, this book shows us what we often overlook: that meaning is everywhere what we make of it. Her making is a delight.

Genres: Poetry

50 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Liat Berdugo is an American artist and writer whose work focuses on the strange, delightful and increasingly ambiguous terrain between the digital and the analog, the online and the offline, and the scientific and the literary. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally, including the Urban Art and Media Organization in Munich, the Athens Video */ Art Festival, the Boston Cyberarts Gallery and DysTorpia Media Series in New York. She studied mathematics at Brown University and Digital + Media at the Rhode Island School of Design. More at http://digikits.ch.

Reviews

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wife got this and two year old wound up paging through it so I grabbed it and read it to her and really liked it. Every page is a headline, a descriptive line, a simple line drawing, and a brief figure legend, all of them elusively, associatively, and often comically related. I suppose this is "poetry" but its use of images and a set repeated form feels like something else. A good book to read to a kid, a good bathroom book most likely, a great stocking stuffer/small gift for the cracked aesthete in your life, a nice little publication to turn your brain inside out for the better.

[Nita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovely concept but felt superficial and I prefer more thoughtful and nuanced shiz. Felt like the author's intelligence and wit was being wasted on jazz hands. If you're going to drop some möbius topological innertubes why not parallel path some insights that are psychologically as complex and advanced as the corresponding maths? I would like to see how this author would express this vector when she is older. Like, sixty. Or seventy. I want a septuagenarian Liat B. to take some advanced maff diagrams and explore this again. Would love to see what that would be. I am guessing parallel lines would go out of their minds and intersect.

[Rowan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't say enough how much I love this book. I've read and re-read it dozens of times, and each time I'm newly surprised by its wit, it's sheer joy in the world.