Alex's Adventures in Numberland: Dispatches from the Wonderful World of Mathematics

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It also reminded me of the debates I would have as a portfolio analyst with my quant boss about over-reliance on statistical models to predict the fortunes of industry segments. I'm an engineer, so I might be slightly better positioned to understand this text, but the format and language of the book assumes nothing of the reader (without being condescending) and explains every concept in a way that even a lay person will be able to follow. U]nderstanding quantities in terms of exact numbers is not a universal intuition; it is a product of culture. And that brings us to the final chapter, appropriately about infinity, a concept discussed throughout the book--especially in the bits on counting and number sequencing--but thoroughly analysed from a mathematical and philosophical standpoint here.

It is noticeable that the author is trying to offer something to readers who have little or nothing to do with numbers and maths. I found Simon Singh's 'Fermat's Last Theorem' a bit of a page turner which either makes me a right saddo or an intellectual genius.Packed with fascinating, eye-opening anecdotes, Alex's Adventures in Numberland is an exhilarating cocktail of history, reportage and mathematical proofs that will leave you awestruck. Gamblers wanted to know how to beat the house and, by examining the mathematical patterns and probabilities in a game, were rewarded with intricate ways of gaining a tiny edge. They have no need to count lots of things and, indeed, see counting endlessly as a ludicrous activity. From the world's fastest mental calculators in Germany to numerologists in the US desert, from a startlingly numerate chimpanzee in Japan to venerable Hindu sages in India, these dispatches from 'Numberland' are an unlikely but exhilarating cocktail of history, reportage and mathematical proofs. He used a mnemonic technique, assigning syllables to each number from 0 to 9 and then translating pi's decimals into words, which in turn formed sentences.

g. there are no straight straight lines passing through the north pole and that are parallel to the equator). They have studied the properties and patterns in numbers, straight lines, curves, surfaces, cubes and hypercubes, all in a bid to understand how these things fit together and what those details might reveal about the deeper logic of mathematics. There have been books about the history of mathematics before and, I hope, there will be many more in the future. But as illustrative of my point as this passage may be, I only included it because it contains the word "legerdemain.It is incredibly neutral in its treatment of all the branches of math, no matter how bogus they may seem (I'm looking at you, Vedic math). Bellos starts his tour of the mathematical world with some anthropology, asking whether numbers are something natural to humans, or whether they are learned and constructed. Alex explains the surprising geometry of the 50p piece, and the strategy of how best to gamble it in a casino.