One to Nine
The Inner Life of Numbers
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
What Lynne Truss did for grammar in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Andrew Hodges now does for mathematics.
Andrew Hodges, one of Britain’s leading biographers and mathematical writers, brings numbers to three-dimensional life in this delightful and illuminating volume, filled with illustrations, which makes even the most challenging math problems accessible to the layperson. Inspired by millennia of human attempts to figure things out, this pithy book, which tackles mathematical conundrums from the ancient Greeks to superstring theory, finds a new twist to everything from musical harmony to code breaking, from the chemistry of sunflowers to the mystery of magic squares. Starting with the puzzle of defining unity, and ending with the recurring nines of infinite decimals, Hodges tells a story that takes in quantum physics, cosmology, climate change, and the origin of the computer. Hodges has written a classic work, at once playful but satisfyingly instructional, which will be ideal for the math aficionado and the Sudoku addict as well as for the life of the party.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A frank acknowledgment that "anything I wrote was bound to resemble" Constance Reid's seminal From Zero to Infinity doesn't stop mathematician and biographer Hodges (Alan Turing: The Enigma) from boldly launching into his own rather disjointed explanation of the place of the numbers one through nine in mathematics and (primarily Western) culture. Pop culture references and political topics such as global warming, presumably meant to make terms like "quantum of existence" a little less scary to the novice, appear alongside subjects of more interest to math nerds (the author debunks the common assumption that mathematicians are male, overweight and perennially single). Some knowledge of mathematical vocabulary and history is necessary to fully appreciate Hodges's merry skipping from one subject to another a single page mentions "Vonnegut's fiction... Plato's aesthetics, Euclid's pentagons, Fibonacci's rabbits the inspiration of Islamic art and its parallels in Kepler" but even the most halfhearted former math major will find a lot of familiar topics, like Schr dinger's cat and the equivalence of 1 with 0.99999.... The result is not entirely satisfying to either numerophobes or numerophiles. 40 illus.
