I was looking for a book to fill in the first Bingo space: something I don't normally read about. I pulled a few pretty heavy looking science books off the shelf but wasn't really in the mood to dig into gene splicer and DNA sequencing. But, Alex Bellos's ode to the magic of mathematics seemed just right. Alex's Adventures in Numberland takes us through the history and mystery of numbers from figuring out pi to understanding infinity. Along the way, he tells stories and introduces us to interesting people. I don't claim to understand everything he talked about but he did remind me that I used to do Sudoku and loved playing with magic squares when I was a kid. So, i downloaded a Sudoku app and have been having fun!

I read this one slowly as each chapter is mostly self-contained and took some time to digest. He does refer back sometimes mostly because he references a lot of historical figures who were involved in various mathematical discoveries. ( )

This is a fun and engaging book that shows readers that math is everywhere and anyone can do math. The book shows how math is used every day outside of school and how it can be fun to do. This book does a great job at incorporating different cultures and history into mathematical curriculum. ( )

Summary: Good set of essays about different ways to look at mathematics and numbers. Each one got me thinking in different ways. You could read one after the other or pick and mix if you like.

Things I liked: Friendly style, relatable stories.

Things I thought could be improved:

Unfortunately I left my review too long ... and now I can't really think of anything.

Highlight: The chapter on the 'golden ratio'. I applied this to making pancakes on the same weekend and haven't looked back since. ( )

Some interesting chapters, some rather complicated chapters and a few boring chapters. Overall I liked the book, but it could have had more maths stuff and less people interviews. ( )

Numbers are not ubiquitous in human societies. This is just one of the many facts that can be learned from “Here’s Looking At Euclid,” an entry on popular mathematics from Alex Bellos. That isn’t to say that numbers themselves are useless or that the people have no concept of number, they just don’t need to have numbers past five or so. I have heard of tribes of people that are like this, and it is quite fascinating. For instance, take the number line, you know, that thing you learned in second grade that organizes all the integers into an evenly spaced line. Apparently, if you tell a kindergartner or someone unfamiliar with numbering to arrange numbers from 1 to 10, they will arrange those numbers in a logarithmic fashion. After all, 10 is twice as large as 5. Thus, it is thought that ratios play a bigger part than exact answers. This makes sense. If you encounter a pride of lions, why bother counting the exact number of lions in the pride? It is sufficient to know if your tribe or troop has more members.

There is other interesting information in the book as well. Take the idea of changing to base-12 for everything. This so-called “dozenal” system has many ardent supporters. It makes some fractions easier to grok. Some have even tried to go all the way to a base-60 system, but it requires far too many terms. It talks about why your average Chinese person can memorize more digits than your average English speaker (the words for the numbers are shorter, allowing them to fit more into the phonetic loop) and the mastery of the abacus for mental calculations.

Some things seem obvious right now but were not to people of the past. Take the concept of nothing, the zero for instance. The zero has tons of utility as a placeholder and as a concept in and of itself. Without zero we might have to do arithmetic with Roman Numerals or something, and who honestly would want to do something so cumbersome? It talks about Vedic Mathematics, Mental Math, the method of exhaustion for finding the value of pi, and so on.

Speaking of pi, that is another interesting subject. Back before we knew of algebraic expansions and series, we had to put a circle between two polygons. There were tons of contests and shows of prowess to get the number as accurate as possible. The fact that it isn’t practical wasn’t the point; the point was that it could be more accurate. It’s like people climbing Everest or going to the South Pole. Sometimes it is the romance that draws people.

Some of it follows logically from the previously covered material. Take the idea of logarithms; immediately following those is the invention of the Slide Rule, the obsolete tool that got us to the Moon and back. Then there is the section on Recreational Mathematics. It covers Sudoku, Magic Squares, the Fifteen Puzzle, Tangrams, the Rubik’s Cube, Chess Problems, ambigrams, and Martin Gardner.

Throughout the book are such interesting bits of trivia. The book doesn’t really contain many equations that would put a person off of reading it, and Bellos writes in a manner that shows his own fascination with the subject, and his enthusiasm shines through the pages. ( )