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

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Also the rudimentary thought of quantifying ideas and enumerating large/small quantities , their relation between scales and the ethno-religious constraints , the edification of ideas through various times and filters in human history is quite captivatingly presented in this book and there influence on modern day contemporary society is looked into with lucidity. A tenth anniversary edition of the iconic book about the wonderful world of mathsSunday Times bestseller | Shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize'Original and highly entertaining' Sunday Times'A page turner about humanity's strange, never easy and, above all, never dull relationship with numbers' New Scientist'Will leave you hooked on numbers' Daily TelegraphIn 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. The current record for reciting the digital expansion of pi from memory is held by Akira Haraguchi, a 60 year old retired engineer from Japan. Some of the expeditions have led to scientific insights about the world around us (the universe might turn out to have a hyperbolic shape first imagined by mathematicians hundreds of years ago) and the physical laws that govern it. 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.

Trading Address (Warehouse) Unit E, Vulcan Business Complex, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EB. Chapters 0 tells how numbers emerged, evolving from a means of counting items necessary for survival to wholly counter-intuitive abstract concepts. 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. If nothing, you should read this book to learn about an encyclopedia of sequences (that also converts them into music), to see the unbelievable impact of the invention of the electronic calculator, to imagine a world of rivalries between human equation solvers and where human calculators would indulge in math duels!You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

The slide rule exposed my lack of dexterity, which I blame for a lifelong preference for the directionally correct over pinpoint accuracy. He makes a frank observation that should give pause to any reader: “By age 16, schoolkids have learned almost no math beyond what was already known in the mid-seventeenth century, and likewise by the time they are 18, they have not gone beyond the mid-eighteenth century. 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. While I was reading this book , I noticed it was published by Bloomsbury and I remembered that a few years ago they were doing rather poorly until J.When I saw this book on one of my frequent browses I thought that sounds right up my street so bought it (it had good reviews). In the 1980s, presumably with the help of comupters, the Chudnovsky brothers developed an even more ferocious formula (p165).

Mathematical thought is one of the great achievements of the human race, and arguably the foundation of all human progress.Mathematics gets a bad press in school and elsewhere, characterized as dry and difficult ,is one of the most hated topics in a student can read. On one hand it’s an easy read, a beach read if you will, and it covers quite a lot of math’s ground in relatively little space.