by We don’t have fond memories of our college math courses. Learning the intricacies of geometry or figuring out the infiniteness of pi weren’t exactly recreational activities, and it was all we could do to keep our eyes open while studying for midterms. But if we had something as cool as Incredible Numbers in our backpacks, things might have been different.
Despite a plethora of fun and colorful interactive elements and engaging animations, Incredible Numbers isn’t a dumbed-down app for the digital generation. Rather, Professor Ian Stewart uses the iPad’s boundless teaching tools to take the mystery out of some of mathematics’ most difficult concepts, including factorials, Fibonacci numbers, and heptadecagons. An attractive menu of eight circles—plus a bonus section dedicated to brainteasers—guides you to your chosen lesson, but the simple one-word headings hardly prepare you for the wealth of information inside.
Tap on the red Music circle, for example, and you’ll learn about vibrations and patterns, watching as sound affects sine curves and experimenting with how complex waveforms are split into harmonics. It’s all very elegant and relatively easy to follow, and we quickly became engrossed in the numerous interactive theories and activities. Each lesson is more stunning than the last, and there’s even a breathtaking beauty in doing something as simple as sorting a list of prime numbers.
Incredible Numbers has a bright, animated interface that seems like it would educate and entertain a school-aged child for hours, but make no mistake: it’s not an app for young minds (at least not average ones). While there’s a certain face-value enjoyment in manipulating the various charts and graphs that are sprinkled throughout each chapter, many of the lessons are extremely advanced, and we found ourselves wanting a bit of an elementary discussion of some topics before we dove into the harder stuff.
The bottom line. Incredible Numbers is a beautiful tool for learning mathematics, but you’d better be wearing your thinking cap.
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