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The latter is no doubt core to the book's strengths, because Bellos brings a hobbyists's enthusiasm along with a sympathy for the semi-literacy most of us bring to the maths.
He commences by describing how different cultures use counting and numbers, and in many ways this is the most interesting part of the book. He has a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from Oxford, and is a former South America correspondent for the Guardian . Concerning "the golden ratio," Bellos notes, "It may sound Orwellian, but some irrational numbers are more irrational than others.
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. 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! We work closely with publishers and authors to ensure that we offer the best books on the market for your child.
I also liked that Bellos does not revert to hyperbolic fan's zeal to inspire the same passion in the reader. From here, the book backtracks into another chapter on games, or more accurately gaming, and the evolution of probability theory, which, as any derivatives trader with an ounce of conscience can attest, is the root of the current economic downturn if you don't count Obamacare and high tax rates on corporations and the rich (ok, that was sarcasm).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. It's no mean feat to be able to explain concepts like Zeno's paradox, regression to the mean, squaring a circle and Riemann's non-Euclidean geometry without using any equations. All of our books are 100% brand new, unread and purchased directly from the publishers in bulk allowing us to pass the huge savings on to you!
When he was the Guardian's correspondent in South America he wrote Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, a look at contemporary Brazil seen through soccer. Trading Address (Warehouse) Unit E, Vulcan Business Complex, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EB. Probability, Number Theory, Geometry and Statistics follow, and in the limit as the page number tends to infinity, the book tends to resemble a maths textbook. As the book progresses, so does the abstract nature of the subject matter, and the concept of pi provides the perfect bridge between numeracy and philosophy, which had already emerged with the chapter on zero. 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.The highest found (at the time of publication of the book) was 2 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. 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. 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.
All the people in this book have been treated as creative artists and their work has been explored with childlike wonder. Chapter Five reinforces the connection, noting, "Algebra lets us see beyond the legerdemain providing a way to go from the concrete to the abstract--from tracking the behaviour of a specific number to tracking the behaviour of any number.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. In probing the many intrigues of that most beloved of numbers, pi, he visits with two brothers so obsessed with the elusive number that they built a supercomputer in their Manhattan apartment to study it. 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. Strings of data are dull, you might think, percentages and sums best left to calculators (or, these days, Google).
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