Alex's Adventures in Numberland: Dispatches from the Wonderful World of Mathematics

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But as illustrative of my point as this passage may be, I only included it because it contains the word "legerdemain. Gamblers wanted to know how to beat the house and, by examining the mathematical patterns and probabilities in a game, were rewarded with intricate ways of gaining a tiny edge. He has organized the book in the way that allows him to be chronological while also taking diversions from time to time to connect with what's happening now in the field of mathematics. There have been books about the history of mathematics before and, I hope, there will be many more in the future.

org In addition to cataloging number sequences, there is a tool for converting the sequence into musical notes.

This is yet another concept with which I struggled, this time as a university student in 1974, because the idea of anything normal in a world characterised by Vietnam, Watergate and the Bay City Rollers could only be, in the words of Spiro T. It is incredibly neutral in its treatment of all the branches of math, no matter how bogus they may seem (I'm looking at you, Vedic math).

Bellos starts his tour of the mathematical world with some anthropology, asking whether numbers are something natural to humans, or whether they are learned and constructed. The slide rule exposed my lack of dexterity, which I blame for a lifelong preference for the directionally correct over pinpoint accuracy. By working with correspondences between infinite sets he characterized some infinite sets as countable (aleph), and others as non-countable (beth).They have no need to count lots of things and, indeed, see counting endlessly as a ludicrous activity. I found Simon Singh's 'Fermat's Last Theorem' a bit of a page turner which either makes me a right saddo or an intellectual genius. The style is laced with humour, but at all times, the star of the show is mathematics Ian Stewart, Prospect It is to be hoped that the uncountable delights of Bellos’s book, its verve and feeling for mathematics, convey its enchantments to a new generation.

His overriding theme is that preconceptions shaped by culture and biological hard-wiring are unconsciously embedded in our thinking. He is also the author of the popular math books Here's Looking at Euclid and The Grapes of Math, which were both international bestsellers. Chapter 1 discusses the evolution of counting and is devoted to the limitations of the base 10 numeral system under which the West operates. Two reasons: (1) we have ten fingers, a pretty obvious observation after someone points it out to you; and (2) the French, who pretty much forced Europe to adopt decimalisation, probably in a fit of pique after losing out to English in the language stakes.In this richly entertaining and accessible book, Alex Bellos explodes the myth that maths is best left to the geeks, and demonstrates the remarkable ways it's linked to our everyday lives. Along the way, he relates amusing stories involving eccentric people and their often mundane means--origami, sponges, crochet--of giving physical shape to the downright unfathomable. In this sense, maths is a more ancient and fixed base for knowledge than science, which is continually improved and changed in light of new evidence. I have a degree in mathematics, but there were many things in the book that were new to me, and some that made my jaw drop. Mathematicians have explored ever more abstract worlds and geometries, floating in dimensions that may or may not exist and finding symmetries and patterns in hard-to-imagine shapes.

My feeling is though, that anyone without mathematical training may start to lose interest at about Chapter 5, when algebra is introduced. And that brings us to the final chapter, appropriately about infinity, a concept discussed throughout the book--especially in the bits on counting and number sequencing--but thoroughly analysed from a mathematical and philosophical standpoint here. It’s my journey as I travel around the world meeting characters who bring mathematical ideas to life. What ensues is both a historical tour and spontaneous encounters with some of the most eccentric people currently operating on the fringes of mathematics.Rather, he provides a series of interesting facts and folksy supporting anecdotes to show the development of: (1) different fields--geometry, probability, statistics; (2) concepts--pi, phi, infinity, zero; and (3) tools--logarithms, slide rules, the quincunx; in a way that is mostly understandable and usually entertaining. Bellos has traveled all around the globe and has plunged into history to uncover fascinating stories of mathematical achievement, from the breakthroughs of Euclid, the greatest mathematician of all time, to the creations of the Zen master of origami, one of the hottest areas of mathematical work today.