I’ve just finished reading Eugenia Cheng’s Unequal: The Maths of When Things Do and Don’t Add Up , and I enjoyed it a lot. It’s a gallop from numbers through functions to category theory, using equality — or equivalence — as a through line.

Some of the points are well-worn to a pop-science junkie like myself, but I enjoyed Cheng’s style. There’s a rigour behind the writing, though she has a habit of saying “we’ll come back to that later” and I’m not sure the payoff ever makes up for the push-off. I ended up with a list of these IOUs, and not all of them were obviously paid.

What the book does give you is a sense of the agility, the sparkiness, the flittering nature of Cheng’s mind. A mathematical idea sparks into a vulnerable, human train of thought — sometimes into a whole cascade of running thoughts. Those moments are the best in it, because they pulled me out of the dry pop-science world and into something quite different.

That said, I found the maths better than the social policy — even though we clearly share many of the same political views. I was left feeling that the social arguments implied things were simpler and cleaner than they might be. She’s careful to say that maths helps us understand the complexity better, but I didn’t quite buy it.

There’s a wokeness to it which is unabashed and unhedged. And I noticed that I found that exciting in a way I don’t think I would have ten years ago. I guess Trump’s truly made it feel transgressive to be progressive. This is clearly more my problem than Cheng’s. It felt brave, but I wish it had just felt normal.

Also: so many baking and cooking analogies. I haven’t been this hungry reading a non-fiction book since a J2EE book — oh yes, that happened — that used a pizza company as its running example.

Worth your time, but be sure to have a snack handy.