Alex Through the Looking Glass by Alex Bellos review informative and quirky

From the ubiquity of one to our love of seven, Bellos explores and explains the meanings we attach to numbers

In Review's roundup of "books of the year" last December, Tom Stoppard chose The New York Times Book of Mathematics , a volume that features surprisingly few equations and diagrams. This choice reminded me of a conversation 16 years ago, when he mentioned to me that one theme of his play Arcadia occurred to him after he read James Gleick's Chaos on a beach. Stoppard has always looked out for good popular expositions of the big ideas in science and maths and he enjoyed BBC's Horizon programmes, despite "all those sodding graphics".

These days, with scientists continually urged to "engage" with the public, there is an unprecedented amount of material for anyone interested in modern science. And there is plenty of good writing on mathematics, too Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Singh, Ian Stewart and others have proved impressively resourceful at mining maths and the lives of its practitioners for good stories that highlight the subject's allure, power and utility.

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