Love Triangle is a book by Matt Parker about the history and maths of triangles – mostly the maths.

Never finding maths easy, I’m one of ‘the masses’ to whom Matt says he wants to bring maths. I became interested in triangles not because of Pythagoras, but through planning a novel about a love triangle.

There is no sense of this kind of painful three-sided relationship in Love Triangle. We are mostly in the world of mathematical abstraction, via hot air balloons scaring pigs, and United States presidents revealing secrets about spy satellites by putting classified imagery on social media. There’s one section about art where things started to get interesting, only for the narrative to head off into an odd digression about UK road signs for a stadium, which show a football with mathematically inaccurate hexagons. The author was so exercised about this that he complained to the government. From my non-mathematical perspective I wondered why stop with hexagons? The picture on the sign is two dimensional, when an actual football is three dimensional. And does the picture match the regulation ball size as defined by the FA? Why not just stick an actual football on the sign for maximum precision? I recall an anecdote about Picasso, where someone was giving the artist a hard time about the surrealist portrayal of women in his paintings, producing a picture of his girlfriend as evidence of how they should appear. “And is she really rather small and flat?” Picasso is supposed to have asked looking at the photo.

This book is interesting. The fact that it was hard to follow was no doubt my fault as I’ve always struggled with numbers. But beyond that, I found it kind of… claustrophobic. That might be the word, even when the subject under discussion can be used to measure stellar distances. I would humbly suggest that although Picasso and I have nothing in common, there were moments of sympathy with him in being told to see reality in very particular terms, when other terms were available. No doubt Love Triangle on occasion brings precision to a lazy popular outlook. At other times it felt like it was leading me on an obsessive wander down a dark, cramped, hexagonal alley.