Contemporary Mathematics

Reviewed by Emily Jones, Lecturer, University of Texas at Arlington on 12/1/23

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

Incredibly detailed examples, with step by step solutions an an excellent array of exercises for each section.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The book is very accurate, and I did not notice any errors or blatant biases.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

Some of the examples are a little dated in their pop culture references, especially in the voting methods chapter, but this would be easy to update or even localize for a specific year or university.

Clarity rating: 5

The clarity for both instructors seeking to implement and students learning from this text is excellent.

Consistency rating: 5

Layout is consistent in a way that makes it easy to find specific sections or items, from exercises to formulas.

Modularity rating: 5

Chapter sections are reasonable to cover 1-3 sections per lecture depending on time and student comprehension.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

I definitely approve of the logical flow of the book; concepts build naturally within chapters. I might personally rearrange the chapter order, for example putting the geometry and measurement chapters directly after the number representations chapter, but otherwise the flow works very well for building up over the course of a semester.

Interface rating: 4

PDF is searchable with video links, but doesn't appear to have any pre-set bookmarks for navigating a chapter at a time. The text is so detailed that the PDF takes a lot of time to load. Making modular by-chapter PDFs or including navigation would be a huge improvement, or something instructors could add for their own use.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

Excellent grammar.

Cultural Relevance rating: 4

While nothing jarring jumped out at me, and I did appreciate the variety of references in examples, they are very United States-centric, and focused on mainstream U.S. culture. This is something to be aware of, but the setup makes it straightforward to localize or specialize examples for a specific student population. Additionally, the inclusion of pronunciation guides for historic mathematician names was excellent. The inclusion of Harry Potter in examples isn't ideal.

Comments

This book is an excellent template for a Contemporary Math for non-STEM majors. If your university's curriculum requirements include higher level algebra such as solving quadratics, that would need to be added, but the listed topics are covered comprehensively and accessibly.