Title: Alex's adventures in Number land
Author: Alex Bellos
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
Alex Bellos has written about maths in a very lucid and simple manner making this book entertaining as well as informative. He writes about the history of mathematics, the lives of mathematicians, and other random facts that makes it an easy read. The proofs and other mathematical calculations are simple for most part, and high school mathematics is enough to understand these. More importantly, he gives you different perspectives on this, and shows you why we did what we did to prove a theorem; something that textbooks always seem to hide from us.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
He describes different counting systems that were used through the ages, a few which are still in use today and the schemes that go on behind the scenes when these systems change. He writes about some ‘human calculators', people who can perform complex mathematical calculations in their head. He goes to Japan and discovers Anzan, which is the virtual abacus that is taught to school children there. He meets Shankaracharya and discusses Vedic mathematics with him, and describes a few methods used in it. Unsurprisingly, he does a better job than any of the Vedic mathematics textbooks available. He shows how you can play around with numbers and shapes, and come up with new ideas and puzzles.
Though you might not enjoy every topic in the book, there is something of interest to everyone, whether it's about beating the odds in a casino, or the geometry behind Origami, the story of the Rubik's Cube or Sudoku, or the more esoteric departments of pure mathematics, like the story of pi. If you still don't like any of this, then just head to the section on numerology, whose presence in this book is a bit dubious. Overall, it is a book worth buying.
Harsha is a III year B.A Literature student in the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.