Five More Golden Rules by John Casti, Wiley, £18.50, ISBN
0471322334
AN APOCRYPHAL tale has it that Queen Victoria was so taken with Lewis
Carroll’s Alice stories that she insisted on being sent a copy of his
next book. Keen to avoid incurring the monarch’s wrath, Carroll—aka
Charles Dodgson, an Oxford maths don—did as he was instructed, and duly
sent Her Majesty an impenetrable treatise on determinants.
The story may be bunk, but I was beginning to know how Queen Victoria might
have felt within an hour of starting to read John Casti’s Five More Golden
Rules.
As…
