Square Root of Two: A review

Doug Ensley and John Ensley wrote a cute review of the book The Square Root of 2: A Dialogue Concerning a Number and a Sequence where they adopted the style of the book and wrote in the form of a dialogue.

Unfortunately, the book sounds pretty dull and not worth the time. Still, if you have second to read the review, it's entertaining. Here's a sample:

What did you think of David Flannery’s book on the square root of two?

At first I thought, “Can there really be 250 pages of stuff to say about the square root of two?” I also thought it had a cool cover.

So you judged a book by its cover?

Yeah, I guess I did at first. I also wanted to find out how anyone could possibly write an entire book about the square root of two.

In all fairness, the book is more about some mathematics pertaining to the square root of two among other things. It is only as long as it is because of the playful informal dialogue used throughout the entire book.

Isn’t it kind of weird to write a math book in dialogue form? The boldface voice made me think of God on a mountain speaking from a burning chalkboard.

The dialogue form between Master and Pupil is a tradition that goes back to Greek writers like Plato.

I still thing it is weird to write in dialogue form, but I’ll admit that it does make the math pretty easy to understand.