Perfect Figures
The Lore of Numbers and How We Learned to Count
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Since the beginning of civilization, numbers have been more than just a way to keep count. Perfect Figures tells the stories of how each number came to be and what incredible associations and superstitions have been connected to them ever since. Along the way are some of the great oddities of numbers' past as:
-a time when finger-counting was a sign of intelligence (the Venerable Bede could count to a million on his hands)
-the medieval Algorists, who were burnt at the stake for their use of Arabic rather than Roman numerals
-the Bank of England, which stubbornly kept accounts on notched wooden sticks until 1826
Filled with Crumpacker's eloquent wit and broad intelligence, Perfect Figures brings the history of numbers to life just as Bill Bryson did for the English language in The Mother Tongue.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lighter-than-light tour, Crumpacker (The Sex Life of Food) reconstructs the history of each of the numbers one through 12, their etymology, how they came to be written and their perceived qualities across various cultures. To this she adds a farrago of facts, observations and her own odd and usually humorous free associations. For example, about one and two, she points out that in some languages, "God is the same as the word for one, and two is the same as the word for sin"; about three, she says that "Captain Kirk and Spock played chess three times.... Kirk won all three games." And she tells us that in China nine signifies good luck, in Japan bad. Besides these cultural references, Crumpacker includes a description of the evolution of counting strategies, discussions of Fibonacci numbers, the Golden Mean, and binary and other bases. Crumpacker is erudite and packs hundreds of facts that range from the educational to the frivolous into a work that is best described as "frothy."
