Approach
The Idea
Book Review: Symmetry, A Journey Into the Patterns of Nature by Author Marcus du Sautoy
I work as an Adlerian Psychotherapist/Feldenkrais person, in a private general psychotherapist practice in the Riverdale community in Toronto. Every client I work with I treat as a unique ecosystem and over time an organic commonality has become apparent.
I am a stranger to mathematics and a broad spectrum reader. Reading this book was a key to the magic kingdom leapfrogging the mathematics haze straight into the clear blue sky of “what the natural world has always known, perfect symmetry is hard to obtain” (pg. 67). Spend time with Fibonacci and a snail and if you know about this already take great comfort in the clarity of presentation and if it is new to you as it was to me, take great joy in a fundamental representation of a universal truth.
I would glean that in his daily life Marcus du Sautoy “tries to find the logic or the pattern that helps to generate the world I see around me”. I sit by his side and together, seated on the magic carpet ride that has been his life he brings me along with him as he climbs, navigates and also relates the adventures of other memorable minds that have followed their love of nature through visiting these elementary patterns. Through their and his devotion this adventure story is told and as his reader I was left to read slower and slower as the end crept nearer and nearer my not wanting the adventure to be over. Fine collaboration is evident throughout from the touch and look to the text type and just as a master engineer constructs a rollercoaster to be exciting yet safe, the editor Mitzi Angel, has so polished this work yet leaving all the texture, clarity and liveliness it deserves.
“As Descartes had declared, “sense perceptions are sense deceptions”" (pg163)
…”Mathematics is about communication” (pg198) “put in too little detail and readers will have not enough directions to help them through the maze. Yet put in too much and you swamp the readers, who will then have no clear vision of where you are trying to take them.” Then, (pg208) “everything must be sign posted so that the reader doesn’t get lost.” True to his word, I am never lost.
“Symmetries in mathmatics explain fundamental question about basic objects in nature” (pg264)… “As cells double each time, symmetry is playing a crucial role in determining the possible configurations for the new cells and ultimately for the shape of our bodies…symmetry underlies life (matter)…provides nature with an arrangement which minimizes energy”(Pg266). Thalidomide produced a poison rather than a therapeutic intervention, and I learn of and appreciate the understanding of “chirality” (pg268). “Mirror neurons fire making a copy of the action” (pg281) the common sense of mathematics, saving effort, staying alive.
This is an adventure story as relevant to everyday as is a sunrise, and sunset. When I think of who would love this book: artists will enjoy the Alhambra, people who love history will enjoy this take on dramatic characters we rarely appreciate, dreamers of altered dimensions, science fiction readers, and kids who have just bumped into a good teacher and are beginning a path that includes mathematics, will have a positive rave.
p.s. there is no end here, just more discoveries to be revealed and waiting for you. (pg.208) … “understanding something…you suddenly get it, you try to convey it to others, and the hardest is translating it to the printed page.” In this book is an elegant read and the author has my appreciation in delivering beautiful pages. The facts you can find elsewhere, the context and wisdom is another matter. I will be bringing the other book, ‘The Music of the Primes’ by Marcus Du Sautoy on our summer family holiday.
View this book on Amazon.com
Kathy Vance