It's organised and presented by the infamous and highly respected Horace Bent, a time served Old Skool publishing journalist at The Bookseller, the UK's main trade magazine. The award is given to the book (and it has to be a real book, none of this short-run self published three copies ever bought nonsense) with the oddest title.
This year's shortlist is:
- Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter by David Crompton
- Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich by James A Yannes
- Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes by Daina Taimina
- Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots by Ronald C Arkin
- The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease by Ellen Scherl and Maria Dubinsky
- What Kind of Bean is This Chihuahua? by Tara Jansen-Meyer
All great and worthy entries I'm sure, but there's really no substitute for voting Crochet. My reasoning, in the spirit of the competition, is thus:
The superb juxtaposition of relativistic equations and traditionally feminine handicraft skillfully blend against a backdrop of four dimensional hyperbolic space utilising the three dimensional creations of a wool based algorithm in a context of knot theory and non Euclidian geometry carrying a sublimely fundamental and yet simultaneous intimate and accessible viewpoint on the structure of the Universe which opens the mathematical structure of spacetime to the casual ovicentric hobbyist.
*DEEP BREATH*
The meta-historical setting of a rural craft invokes powerful images of Einstein's modest upbringing in combination with the sub-metaphorical emotional influence of handmade knitwear leading to a subconscious acceptance of the incongruity self evident in the utilisation of a folded two dimensional yarn construct attempting to represent a geometry including a mathematically imaginary component.
Vote Crochet, you know it makes sense.
In all seriousness, I'm shamelessly pushing this book as a winner because it's a superb book on an astoundingly beautiful subject, both in terms of mathematics, physical theories and handicraft. In laymans terms it covers (mostly from a crochet/knitting point of view) the stunning results of writing the equations behind General Relativity into a knitting pattern. It's not as silly as it sounds....knitting patterns are effectively computer programmes for a single strand of wool, and as such are ideal for trying to demonstrate a mathematical idea. Einstein's theories deal with the idea of treating time as a fourth dimension....but there's no room for one in high school maths. So he tried using imaginary numbers - ones based on the square root of minus one, and commonly shown on a graph at right angles to "normal" numbers - his little thought experiment turned out to be such an accurate description of reality that the theory has to be hard-coded into GPS satellites to stop them going out of synch by several metres a day.
This book takes the simple but highly imaginative step of trying to show Einstein's fourth dimension by writing it into a knitting pattern. The results are extraordinarily beautiful, closely resembling coral reefs. It's a great coffee table book and conversation starter, odd title aside.
You can vote for your favourite at The Bookseller website. (Scroll down, poll on the left)
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