Shape

If you're like most people, geometry is a sterile and dimly remembered exercise you gladly left behind in the dust of ninth grade, along with your active romantic interest in pop singers and the ensembly challenged lifestyle choices.

If you recall any of it, it's plodding through a series of miniscule steps only to prove some fact about triangles that was obvious to you in the first place. That's not geometry. 

Okay, it is geometry, but only a tiny part, which has as much to do with geometry in all its flush modern richness as conjugating a verb has to do with a great novel.

The absolutely delightful geometrist  Jordan Ellenberg's Shape reveals the geometry underneath some of the most important scientific, political, and philosophical problems we face.

Geometry asks: Where are things? Which things are near each other? How can you get from one thing to another thing? Those are important questions. The word "geometry," comes from the Greek for "measuring the world." If anything, that's an undersell.

Geometry doesn't just measure the world—it explains it. Shape shows us how.