Introducing: Conversations With Grant

Why, Maths, Why...

It’s finally here! Or, well, nearly. Two years of crumpled notepaper and shouting at fractions have at last culminated in a new book.

Launches on Amazon Monday 20th March

If you’ve read Affinities, the names Nix and Grant are not, in fact, coincidence.

If you haven’t read Affinities, don’t worry! This has almost nothing to do with the previous story these two were running around in.

Conversations With Grant was physically born out of Affinities in my attempt to understand how an A.I. drone tracking/prediction algorithm would actually work. These conversations between the characters Nix and Grant (yes, this book is literally what it says on the tin) somehow evolved into ten thousand words on their own. Which meant when I cut it out, I had a short novella’s worth of words about how maths affects everyday life on my hands.

Might as well do something with it, right?

Thus was born Nix’s whirlwind tour of mathematics. As Nix and Grant meander through Roman Numerals and medieval clocks to modern Quantum Mechanics, over several cups of coffee, attempting to demystify the theories and formulas invented (and occasionally stumbled upon) over the centuries, she begins to understand how a lot of maths is of crucial, everyday importance. And the occasionally how it was discovered is just as interesting, if not downright hilarious.

Winding back the clock a bit more, the idea for Conversations was metaphysically born when I was in school, daydreaming through the hour-long class and complaining bitterly about the pointlessness of memorizing Pythagoras Theorem and what I was supposed to ever do with fractions in my life when I had access to a calculator.

… Yeah, hindsight is so much fun, isn’t it?

I have a confession to make here.

I am not numerically-inclined. At all. Even now I default to counting the times tables on my fingers (or better yet, my phone’s calculator). The only reason I still remembered that Pythagoras related to triangles before this book was back in school, my dad sitting me down and saying, “See, in a building, these triangles do this. Which is why the roof doesn’t fall down on our heads and kill us all.”

Turns out knowing why some obligatory numbers were important actually helped in remembering it. And why I have no natural talent for numbers, I am very lucky that my dad does.

So, in a desperate attempt to ensure I passed my exams and wasn’t bored to tears in the classroom, my dad – wonderfully patient, reads books on quantum gravity for fun dad – taught me maths. Breaking down the textbook into digestible chunks sprinkled with odd, often hilarious, factoids. And some of it actually stuck!

(Scientists Wrestling Match: Newton -vs- Leibniz: Fight!)

To be fair to my poor, poor teacher, trying to pummel algebra into 30 plus teenagers just before lunch was a task worthy of Hercules.

But back to Conversations:

At the end of 2020, I had 10,000 words of how maths worked. And I thought that, if knowing the real-life applications and some of the pitfalls had helped me, could it help some one else, too? If nothing else, it would be fun to write.

And thus I found myself in the rather weird space of enjoying writing about maths. Though I swear, I might have written it but I still don’t know how those ten thousand words managed to multiply into sixty thousand.

…. Is it strange that I found it easier to wrap my head around quantum entanglement and the holographic universe, but fractions still scare me? Moving on!

The book will be available from Amazon as paperback and eBook as of 20th March.

I will also be posting continuations of Grant & Nix’s conversations once a month, on no particular theme but any mathematical/physics concept that caught my attention, so please subscribe if you are interested! Suggestions for the next topic are welcome.