Book review: Fun with numbers

Hugh wrote this book review for the monthly newspaper of the Oak Crest community in Maryland:

If math was a favorite subject in school, you will love "Here’s Looking at Euclid" by Alex Bellos. Even if you remember your school math as a reincarnation of some medieval torture, there are still things in it you will like.

From Simon & Schuster

Bellos is a British journalist with a math degree from Oxford, so he knows his subject and writes about it in an easy-to-read style. The book is a history of mathematics, and the author has traveled extensively to research contributions to the subject by historical figures as well as to interview contemporary experts.

The chapters are roughly in chronological order, starting with the original number concepts of the human race. We learn about a tribe in the Amazon whose number perception consists of one, two, three, four-ish, and many; and a professor at Cornell who had trouble visualizing a hyperbolic plane, so she created one by crocheting it!

As the author says in the preface, you do not have to read all of the chapters, because each stands on its own. Even if you do not care about hyperbolic planes, or that pi had been carried out to 2.7 trillion decimal places by 2009, you might want to check out chapter six, “Playtime,” where you can learn about math puzzles, magic tricks, and games including Sudoku and Rubik’s Cube. If you are an artist, try chapter eight, “Gold Finger” to learn about the golden mean and the Fibonacci sequence and how they relate to the things you paint. If you ever play the slot machines, you should read chapter nine, “Chance is a fine Thing.” It probably won’t help you to win, but it will help you to understand the odds.

Even if you think math is boring, try "Here’s Looking at Euclid." It might change your mind.