Jamie Buchan

This might be a mildly amusing toilet-time read for the right person, but I suspect I'm not really in the target audience for the book.

The first of its five sections deals with the occurrence of numbers in popular sayings (at sixes and sevens, et al.), and discusses these sayings' etymologies. Alas, the most interesting examples in this section are either fairly well known already or else the etymology is unknown, and it's not particularly interesting to read that "Nineteen to the dozen is a thing people say. But no one knows why."

Next up is a section on numbers in fiction, which is really a short list of films and books the author is familiar with and which have a number in the title — 8 Mile, Seven Samurai, Debbie Does Dallas 9, etc. — or else numbers that are mildly famous because of their appearance in some fictional medium — 007 from James Bond, 42 from Hitchhiker's Guide, and so on. Nothing here is particularly interesting; if you know about the books and films discussed then you probably already know why that number appears, otherwise you probably won't care a great deal.

Third is "Numbers in culture", or perhaps that should be "Stuff that didn't fit in the other four sections". Those scam emails from Nigerian princes are apparently called "419 scams", so they're discussed here. There's an enduring fallacy that we only use ten per cent of our brains. And ten's a number. So that's discussed here. To be honest most of this section feels a bit tacked on, things the author saw on QI and wanted to discuss rather than anything to do with numbers.

Religion and mythology are treated next. A lot of this section looks at gematria and numerology, things which interest me not at all. Buchan repeatedly points out how meaningless these pursuits are, yet does give a dismaying number of pages over to them.

Finally comes "Numbers in Maths and Science." Within this section a smattering of interesting facts concerning numbers and number systems are discussed. The author admits in the book's introduction that he's not a professional scientist or mathematician, and this section in particular smacks of repetition — regurgitated titbits obtained from email interviews with academics and purloined (but not in a plagiaristic sense) from pop-science and -maths books.

As I intimated earlier, I'm not really in the book's target audience. If each of the five sections was expanded into a full book by an expert in the relevant field then I'd probably enjoy some of the results, but in this form and with this level of seeming indifference to the subject I wasn't too fond of the result. And the acerbic final sentence didn't leave a good last impression either.… (plus d'informations)

This might be a mildly amusing toilet-time read for the right person, but I suspect I'm not really in the target audience for the book.

The first of its five sections deals with the occurrence of numbers in popular sayings (at sixes and sevens, et al.), and discusses these sayings' etymologies. Alas, the most interesting examples in this section are either fairly well known already or else the etymology is unknown, and it's not particularly interesting to read that "Nineteen to the dozen is a thing people say. But no one knows why."

Next up is a section on numbers in fiction, which is really a short list of films and books the author is familiar with and which have a number in the title — 8 Mile, Seven Samurai, Debbie Does Dallas 9, etc. — or else numbers that are mildly famous because of their appearance in some fictional medium — 007 from James Bond, 42 from Hitchhiker's Guide, and so on. Nothing here is particularly interesting; if you know about the books and films discussed then you probably already know why that number appears, otherwise you probably won't care a great deal.

Third is "Numbers in culture", or perhaps that should be "Stuff that didn't fit in the other four sections". Those scam emails from Nigerian princes are apparently called "419 scams", so they're discussed here. There's an enduring fallacy that we only use ten per cent of our brains. And ten's a number. So that's discussed here. To be honest most of this section feels a bit tacked on, things the author saw on QI and wanted to discuss rather than anything to do with numbers.

Religion and mythology are treated next. A lot of this section looks at gematria and numerology, things which interest me not at all. Buchan repeatedly points out how meaningless these pursuits are, yet does give a dismaying number of pages over to them.

Finally comes "Numbers in Maths and Science." Within this section a smattering of interesting facts concerning numbers and number systems are discussed. The author admits in the book's introduction that he's not a professional scientist or mathematician, and this section in particular smacks of repetition — regurgitated titbits obtained from email interviews with academics and purloined (but not in a plagiaristic sense) from pop-science and -maths books.

As I intimated earlier, I'm not really in the book's target audience. If each of the five sections was expanded into a full book by an expert in the relevant field then I'd probably enjoy some of the results, but in this form and with this level of seeming indifference to the subject I wasn't too fond of the result. And the acerbic final sentence didn't leave a good last impression either.… (plus d'informations)

Fun book to read and discover mathematical ideas. The book deals with real life math ideas such as Fibonacci's Numbers and where they are used in real life to "fake" famous numbers such as 007 or 8 mile. The author expands upon how these numbers became famous and maybe why they were originally chosen. He even talks about numbers used in real life and not in math such as Dixie and how it relates to the number 10. Interesting book to flip through and read about random facts. I do feel that an index in the back of the book would be beneficial to the book.… (plus d'informations)