Nature, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. His books include Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World and Proof! How the World Became Geometrical.
Alexander applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Liberty's Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Liberty’s Grid takes the reader to the chaotic world of the young United States, where a hodgepodge of different measurement units made government and commerce exceedingly difficult. As a leading member of Congress in the 1780’s Jefferson sought to remedy the problem by introducing decimal units of measurement that were easy to use and, as he saw it, natural. As a basic unit of measurement he proposed the length of one sixtieth of a degree of latitude, which he called the “geographical mile.” But when alerted by his friends in the Paris Academy of Science to the difficulty of determining the exact length of a degree, he decided to put off his reform until they settled on their own plan for universal weights and measures. The delay, in the end, proved fatal to Jefferson’s project, leaving the United States to this day as one of the lone holdouts to the metric system.Learn more about Liberty's Grid at the University of Chicago Press website.
Jefferson’s failed reform is but one example of his determination to impose mathematical order on the unruly realities of the world. In the very same years that he was promoting his novel measurement units, he also introduced his plan to carve up the western territories of the United States into a massive Cartesian grid of straight lines and right angles. In this, as Liberty’s Grid shows, he was more successful. Looking down from a modern airliner the American West appears as a checkerboard of perfect squares stretching from horizon to horizon. It is Jefferson’s mathematical dream become reality.
--Marshal Zeringue
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