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

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Moreover, his goal is not to instruct, any more than the goal of THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS is a manual on chess-playing. But if showmanship is not your cup of tea, then there's a really good critical examination of Pascal's wager, an exploration of the wonders of Pascal's triangle and of course, a fitting end to the book with a mind-mangling (a term I learned from this book) discussion of Cantor's various infinities.

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. What ensues is both a historical tour and spontaneous encounters with some of the most eccentric people currently operating on the fringes of mathematics. Packed with fascinating, eye-opening anecdotes, Alex's Adventures in Numberland is an exhilarating cocktail of history, reportage and mathematical proofs that will leave you awestruck. Concerning "the golden ratio," Bellos notes, "It may sound Orwellian, but some irrational numbers are more irrational than others.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 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. The highest found (at the time of publication of the book) was 2 It is a chapter that discusses Euclid's Fifth Postulate, which came to be reformulated as the Parallel Postulate: “Given a line and a point not on that line, then there is at most one line that goes through the point and is parallel to the original line.

Which would provide a great segue to the book's discussion of infinity if it weren't for intervening chapters on: (1) mathematical puzzles/games-Sudoku, the Rubik's Cube; (2) number sequences--the most fascinating anecdote being the development and applications of The On-Line Encyclopaedia of Integer Sequences, a kind of numerical genome; and (3) the concepts of phi and "the golden ratio" and their relationship to Fibonacci sequences.He used a mnemonic technique, assigning syllables to each number from 0 to 9 and then translating pi's decimals into words, which in turn formed sentences. But you would be hard-pressed to find a book on this subject with the same humour, wonder, and with the comfort of knowing that the author is resolutely on your side on this (sometimes difficult) adventure through the land of numbers and shapes. Their lines tended to compress the distances between higher numbers — a logarithmic as opposed to linear depiction.

They have studied the properties and patterns in numbers, straight lines, curves, surfaces, cubes and hypercubes, all in a bid to understand how these things fit together and what those details might reveal about the deeper logic of mathematics. I joined the Guardian in 1994 as a reporter and in 1998 moved to Rio de Janeiro, where I spent five years as the paper’s South America correspondent. Our team is made up of book lovers who are dedicated to sourcing and providing the best books for kids. Strings of data are dull, you might think, percentages and sums best left to calculators (or, these days, Google). org In addition to cataloging number sequences, there is a tool for converting the sequence into musical notes.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.