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

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Our team is made up of book lovers who are dedicated to sourcing and providing the best books for kids. 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 - Times Literary Supplement You may also be interested in.

I also liked that Bellos does not revert to hyperbolic fan's zeal to inspire the same passion in the reader. 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. The highest found (at the time of publication of the book) was 2 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.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. His books include the bestselling Alex's Adventures in Numberland and its sequel Alex Through the Looking Glass , Visions of Numberland , Can You Solve My Problems? Chapters 0 tells how numbers emerged, evolving from a means of counting items necessary for survival to wholly counter-intuitive abstract concepts.

I have had both, but even after careful reading, there were still many sections that left me puzzled. 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! Strings of data are dull, you might think, percentages and sums best left to calculators (or, these days, Google). Ramanujan, in the early twentieth centiry, developed some remarkable infinite series for pi, including the mind blowing one on page 164 (can be seen at http://en.In December 2009, the record for determining the digital expansion of pi was broken, and now stands at 2. Their lines tended to compress the distances between higher numbers — a logarithmic as opposed to linear depiction. Rather, he provides a series of interesting facts and folksy supporting anecdotes to show the development of: (1) different fields--geometry, probability, statistics; (2) concepts--pi, phi, infinity, zero; and (3) tools--logarithms, slide rules, the quincunx; in a way that is mostly understandable and usually entertaining. This is yet another concept with which I struggled, this time as a university student in 1974, because the idea of anything normal in a world characterised by Vietnam, Watergate and the Bay City Rollers could only be, in the words of Spiro T. 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.

The slide rule exposed my lack of dexterity, which I blame for a lifelong preference for the directionally correct over pinpoint accuracy. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I am not comfortable with maths beyond the basics (O'level 25 years ago) but I bought this book for my husband who loves maths and he loved this book. I was instead a believer in the theory that an industry segment collapses under the weight of too much money chasing it, and all you need for that analysis is a critical mass of Wall Street Journal headlines. He is also the author of the popular math books Here's Looking at Euclid and The Grapes of Math, which were both international bestsellers.

It’s my journey as I travel around the world meeting characters who bring mathematical ideas to life. The record for pi memorisation whilst juggling is held by Mats Bergsten (Sweden) who has recited 9778 digits while juggling three balls.