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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Book That Counts, 4 Nov 2008
Ever wonder where all those pesky theorems came from? Hanker after the origin of geometry? Agonise over how calculus came about?
Peter Bentley's book will still your curious mind on all three scores and many more, taking you through a history of numbers and the tools used to manipulate them, from notches in sticks to Fermat's last theorem, through a series of chapters with not altogether conventional labelling. Hence the fourth chapter is Chapter 1, it takes until the seventh to reach Chapter 2, and the thirteenth is Chapter 12a.
There are chapters on Nothing (or Zero), Logarithms and Infinity, and along the way we learn about people like Pythagorus (basically a cult leader), Newton (a nutcase to judge by his alchemic writings) and Claude E Shannon, who coined the name "bit", for binary digit, and also invented a motorised pogo stick and rode a unicycle.
All good stuff, and generally quite well recounted, though at times a little nerdy.
There are a few points of irritation (as where Bentley, a Brit I think, insists on using the American "math" instead of maths), some glaring bloopers, as on page 48 where he triumphantly announces, "you guessed it, 9 and 2 are prime numbers", and a mystery: just where is the puzzle to which an upside down solution is given at the foot of page 127?
Some things are also somewhat undercooked. In Chapter 3 the point about the significance of the number three fizzles out, without any thought to why we have so many expressions featuring three (hook, line and sinker, and so on), which I imagine are related to the rhetorical trick of grouping things in three. That makes the point actually seem overdone, as there are plenty of examples of the "magic" of twos (shock and awe, love and marriage) and fours (air, fire, earth and water; the four horsemen of the apocalypse).
But overall an enjoyable, educational and engaging read.
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