Math Book Awarded Prize for Year's Oddest Book Title

March 31, 2010

Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes by Daina Taimina is the latest winner of Britain's Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year.

More than 4500 votes were cast. Crocheting Adventures received 1,912 votes.

Horace Bent, blogging for Bookseller.com, discussed the results.

 “I think what won it for Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes is that, very simply, the title is completely bonkers," said Bent. "On the one hand you have the typically feminine, gentle and wooly world of needlework and on the other, the exciting but incredibly un-wooly world of hyperbolic geometry and negative curvature."

He added, tongue-in-cheek, “One hopes that Dr Taimina’s win prompts other enlightened crocheters, knitters, and embroiderers to produce similar works, so I look forward to seeing books such as Cross-stitching String Theory and Felting Feats with Phenomenology adorning bookshop shelves in the near future.”

Taimina is a mathematician at Cornell University and author of the blog Hyperbolic Crochet.

Source: Bookseller (March 26, 2010); BBC (March 26, 2010)