Alex’s Adventures in Numberland: Dispatches from the Wonderful World of Mathematics by Alex Bellos (PDF)

Description

A tenth anniversary edition of the iconic book about the wonderful world of mathsSunday Times bestseller | Shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize’Original and highly entertaining’ Sunday Times’A page turner about humanity’s strange, never easy and, above all, never dull relationship with numbers’ New Scientist’Will leave you hooked on numbers’ Daily TelegraphIn this richly entertaining and accessible book, Alex Bellos explodes the myth that maths is best left to the geeks, and demonstrates the remarkable ways it’s linked to our everyday lives.Alex explains the surprising geometry of the 50p piece, and the strategy of how best to gamble it in a casino. He shines a light on the mathematical patterns in nature, and on the peculiar predictability of random behaviour. He eats a potato crisp whose revolutionary shape was unpalatable to the ancient Greeks, and he shows the deep connections between maths, religion and philosophy.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. The world of maths is a much friendlier and more colourful place than you might have imagined.This anniversary edition is fully revised and updated.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This book covers the world of math as we follow the author on a series of real-life “math adventures.” He covers the math of primitive peoples, the ideas of pi, phi, puzzles, probabilities, mystic uses of numbers, and the concept of infinity(s).In these adventures we meet people who apply math in unique ways. We meet a dentist who thinks like an artist. We meet math professors who become professional gamblers. We meet interesting people in history. We meet people who got rich making puzzles.Who knew the many facets of math? I learned that math can become quite an obsession, and that for many, many reasons! If you want a good overview of some of the extremes of mathematics.I hope he does a sequel where he covers fractals, quaternions, and quantum mechanics in some interesting way, but maybe that would be too much to ask…A great book worth reading more than once…

⭐Interesting history and stories.Most of the time it’s intriguing enough for a reader to flip page after page. But there’re times when it gets a bit hard/tedious to keep reading and requires the reader to be intrinsically very interested in the topic to continue.Partially it’s because it gets into the nitty-gritty of the topics and has lots of graphs and figures as demonstrations/explanations. A very detailed book. Hope this piques your interest rather than puts you off math.

⭐I love the book and bought it as a gift. It arrived promptly and was in great condition.Kudos to the vendor!

⭐This is one incredible book! It is so simple and interesting to read, and contains so many interesting information that I never heard before. I did not noticed, until now, that maths is so deeply integrated into our lives nad plays one very important role. Maths is basis for everything. Whatever we do maths is somewhere bihaind it waiting to be used.

⭐I would recommend this book to anyone who likes numbers, and maths. The book is, quite frankly, a delight to read. Alex starts with simple concepts in each chapter, and gradually takes you through more complex concepts. It is, at first glance, a simple book to read. However, it needs careful reading in order to fully understand all the concepts. The best part, however, is that you can come back to individual chapters and read them again.

⭐A well-written journey from maths-less people through to logarthims and some of the applications of maths in our present day. I thoroughly enjoyed the different descriptions of man’s fascination of numbers and different mathematical problems. Alex gets around, and covers interviews and storeis from most of the continents on our little planet. Well worth a read.

⭐I’m loving it…I just wish I could memorise it and bring out all the interesting relevant snippets as I teach. I can say I read it slowly, as I would get excited about a concpet and then go off and learn more about that, such as the nonperiodic tesselations, or the way people in PNG count.

⭐While the level of the book is relatively simple as books on math go there was still many interesting things to learn. It is a great book to pass on to friends and relatives that are not familiar with mathematics. In addition to some interesting math there are a some splendid stories. Highly recommended to all.

⭐It’s a fairly entertaining read, and there are some concepts in here which definitely appear to be new and original. But Mr. Bellos suffers from being too wordy.Maybe it’s the current fashionable writing style, but I wish people would just be able to present the facts rather than dress them up in “amusing” stories and anecdotes. Or at least make an attempt to make those anecdotes interesting.Maybe the problem is with me; this work is supposed to make non-mathematicians interested in mathematics. As someone who already calls himself a mathematician, however, I found it a bit patronising and tedious.Ian Stewart does this sort of thing far better, I’m afraid.

⭐If you like numbers and are a number anorak you will like this book, but probably already know a lot of it. For me, a mere interested mortal, there was more about numbers than I really wanted to know. I know, it’s a book about numbers, but oh boy, its a book about numbers. It is densely packed with, you guessed it, numbers. On a serious note, there are some really interest facts, for me at least, like why the 50p coin is shaped the way it is, there is a lot of information about the way numbers influence leaf and shell growth. But, it went on and on and on about numbers to the point when I reached the end I was glad I know nothing about numbers. It is interesting and informative but it does get awful dry at times. It’s like eating pudding again and again and again. Good but too good.

⭐The book is a great piece of work which shows the birth of mathematics at different places and at different times all around the world. This book must be read by everyone who wants to know the birth and developement of mathematics at different places and at different times, all around the globe. The book is well researched and all credits are given to all respective regions not like other authors who just go by the fact that mathematics only prospered in Europe.The author, Mr. Alex Bellos is a nice person too. I wrote an e-mail to him regarding some of my doubts in the book tk which he replied in just half a day.

⭐This book isn’t about maths or numbers, it’s more about the history of maths and numbers, which is different. Alex goes into the reasons why certain things are the way they are – why are there 60 minutes in an hour, 12 hours in a day – and of course into lots of great trivia – did you know that the Chinese have a system of counting up to a billion on your fingers? The first few chapters are particularly insightful as he talks about the human perception of logarithmic scale and how it factors into the way we refer to large quantities.The chapter on numerology which I didn’t like or rather, I didn’t understand why it was there or what purpose is served. It was more quasi-mystical and borderline hippie rather than contributing any way to the overall theme of the book. But still, each chapter is sufficiently modular so that the adventures don’t overlap with each other.

⭐This book offered some very interesting and new ideas and also introduced some more complex areas of maths (or at least complex by my standards). I enjoyed vast portions of this book and definitely learned a lot of new things. He goes to a lot of effort to include even those who are complete novices at maths which I respect. I think this book would be suitable to anyone who is GCSE level or above. The only chapter that made my head hurt a little was the final one where he talks about infinity but after a bit I understood.However I think there was a lot of filler which proved very boring. For example he goes on for what seemed like a very long time about discovering digits of pi. Perhaps I just didn’t find certain areas interesting which is totally subjective. For example I didn’t find Vedic maths very interesting but I found hyperbolic planes fascinating. I’m still giving it 4 stars because as I said this is all subjective.

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