Cast aside your arithmophobia – this is the kind of book that will make even the least mathematically minded reader understand the mindblowing, reality-altering beauty of numbers
I imagine that there are some of you for whom mathematics is, metaphorically, a firmly closed book. So, a whole real book about maths that proposes to be entertaining? Pah, you might say. But that would be a mistake. I address this review to the arithmophobe, because the reader who already takes pleasure in the beauty of Euler’s Identity (I’ll get on to that) will have noticed the author’s name and gone off to get the book already. For Alex Bellos’s previous book, Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, has already marked him out as a gifted and enthusiastic guide to the subject. He’s also knowledgeable: one of the important things about mathematicians, of course, is that they have to be right. Everything here can be taken on trust.
The subtitle of this book is “how life reflects numbers, and numbers reflect life”, and Bellos starts – after a brief but fascinating meeting with a taxi driver from Tuscon who has Asperger’s and can break down five-digit numbers into their constituent primes in seconds – with the Sumerians. It was they who started the whole business of arithmetic off, with the word for “one” also meaning “man” and “erect penis”, and “two” meaning “woman”. Once a system was in place, it began to be seen that abstract patterns would emerge; a kind of magic, it could seem.
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