Eugenia Cheng is devoted to pure mathematics—an abstract field that is complex, largely theoretical, and scarcely mentioned in high school. Which makes her an unlikely candidate to bring math to the masses. “Math is a bit like art,” says Cheng, a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield in the UK. “You can appreciate it even if you can’t do it. But people have a phobia.” That’s why she recently signed on as scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She wants to rid the world of math aversion. Now she has also written a book: How to Bake π: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics.
The idea for How to Bake π, out May 5, hit Cheng when she realized that food was a good teaching tool for getting college students to focus. One day, while trying to explain an aspect of algebraic number theory, she realized the concept would be best illustrated by combining blueberry jelly with yogurt. “I acted like I was on a cooking show, and the students immediately knew what I was talking about. It just took off from there.” It worked so well that using food to teach math became the book, which attacks high-level math concepts in an approachable way. Cheng compares baking a flourless cake to doing geometry on a curved surface instead of a flat plane. It will still work without flour, but it will be a different kind of cake, just as geometry on a curved surface is a different kind of math—one that dispels common logic. “Cake is magic, really. You put eggs and sugar and flour together, and it comes out as cake!” Cheng says. For her, math is just as magical.
The idea for How to Bake π, out May 5, hit Cheng when she realized that food was a good teaching tool for getting college students to focus. One day, while trying to explain an aspect of algebraic number theory, she realized the concept would be best illustrated by combining blueberry jelly with yogurt. “I acted like I was on a cooking show, and the students immediately knew what I was talking about. It just took off from there.” It worked so well that using food to teach math became the book, which attacks high-level math concepts in an approachable way. Cheng compares baking a flourless cake to doing geometry on a curved surface instead of a flat plane. It will still work without flour, but it will be a different kind of cake, just as geometry on a curved surface is a different kind of math—one that dispels common logic. “Cake is magic, really. You put eggs and sugar and flour together, and it comes out as cake!” Cheng says. For her, math is just as magical.
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