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

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He has a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from Oxford, and is a former South America correspondent for the Guardian . The insights and intuition you get for the most basic tenets of mathematics from this book Is just exquisite. But I'm happy to say that this rare foray into the realm of written reality scored on both fronts: (1) it reported pretty much indisputably factual information with only the odd conjecturable opinion; and (2) it was very well written. Mathematical thought is one of the great achievements of the human race, and arguably the foundation of all human progress. After studying mathematics and philosophy at university I joined the Evening Argus in Brighton as a trainee reporter.

All of our books are 100% brand new, unread and purchased directly from the publishers in bulk allowing us to pass the huge savings on to you! He makes a frank observation that should give pause to any reader: “By age 16, schoolkids have learned almost no math beyond what was already known in the mid-seventeenth century, and likewise by the time they are 18, they have not gone beyond the mid-eighteenth century.

He has organized the book in the way that allows him to be chronological while also taking diversions from time to time to connect with what's happening now in the field of mathematics. 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. In 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. 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.

Registered office address: Unit 34 Vulcan House Business Centre, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EF. In this sense, maths is a more ancient and fixed base for knowledge than science, which is continually improved and changed in light of new evidence. I have a degree in mathematics, but there were many things in the book that were new to me, and some that made my jaw drop.

When I saw this book on one of my frequent browses I thought that sounds right up my street so bought it (it had good reviews). The style is laced with humour, but at all times, the star of the show is mathematics Ian Stewart, Prospect It is to be hoped that the uncountable delights of Bellos’s book, its verve and feeling for mathematics, convey its enchantments to a new generation. Mathematics gets a bad press in school and elsewhere, characterized as dry and difficult ,is one of the most hated topics in a student can read.

Alex Bellos has a very good way of writing, easy to read and sprinkled, sparingly, with a bit of humour too - thoroughly enjoyable. To usher the reader into the 20th century Bellos explores the ideas of Georg Cantor and David Hilbert on infinity.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

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. 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.Mathematics has revealed the underlying structures of nature, such as the golden ratio that defines the shape of a nautilus's shell. Strings of data are dull, you might think, percentages and sums best left to calculators (or, these days, Google). Alex explains the surprising geometry of the 50p piece, and the strategy of how best to gamble it in a casino.