The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers

Oct 25, 2024 5:31 PM

Author:David Wells

Why was the number of Hardy's taxi significant? Why does Graham's number need its own notation? How many grains of sand would fill the universe? What is the connection between the Golden Ratio and sunflowers? Why is 999 more than a distress call? All these questions and a host more are answered in this fascinating book, which has now been newly revised, with nearly 200 extra entries and some 250 additions to the original entries. From minus one and its square root, via cyclic, weird, amicable, perfect, untouchable and lucky numbers, aliquot sequences, the Cattle problem, Pascal's triangle and the Syracuse algorithm, music, magic and maps, pancakes, polyhedra and palindromes, to numbers so large that they boggle the imagination, all you ever wanted to know about numbers is here. There is even a comprehensive index for those annoying occasions when you remember the name but can't recall the number.

Reviews

An important book... remarkably complete. For anyone interested in the subject of human origins, seldom has it been possible to find out so much between the covers of a popular work.

—— Richard Leakey

A masterful combination of careful scholarship and clever narrative... authoritative and delightful to read.

—— Roger Lewin

Wonderful reading, bringing vivacity to dusty boneyards... Impossible to put down.

—— Jonathan Kingdom , The Times Literary Supplement

At last! In their sane and lucid - and much needed - corrective to the torrent of overblown genetic rhetoric, Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin take the reader on a journey through humanity's seven ages

—— Steven Rose

Bateson and Martin have delivered what others have claimed to provide: a solid, signposted road out of the trench war between nature and nurture

—— Marek Kohn , Independent

With a clarity of style that belies the complexity of the subject, Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin conduct us through the strategic highways adn tactical byways of individual life history

—— Richard Dawkins

'Exhilarating'

—— Melvyn Bragg , Observer

'As enthralling in its own way as was Darwin's original'

—— Kenan Malik , Independent on Sunday

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