Here's Looking at Euclid

May 1, 2010
What Bellos calls the wow factor of mathematics leaps out at the reader from every page of this remarkable foray into the realm of numbers. Beginning with a visit with an Amazon-basin tribe who never count above five, Bellos launches a fascinating journey of discovery, probing numerical riddles ancient and modern. Readers ponder the ingenuity of the early Sumerians, who pioneered the keeping of records by inexplicably tallying their inventories in sixties, and contemplate the resourcefulness of a third-century Chinese sage who manipulated many-sized figures to calculate an accurate approximation for pi. Readers even pause to marvel at how a ninth-century factory mechanic beat the casinos of Monte Carlo by breaking the code of chance. The stories prove so engaging, the personalities so colorful, that readers may forget they are mastering some powerful mathematical concepts. It is, indeed, these conceptsnot the piquant personalitiesthat deliver the most wows. And in the wonderland of multiple infinities, Bellos saves the biggest wow for last. Intellectual entertainment of the first order.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2010
Bellos, a journalist with an undergraduate degree in mathematics, offers a lively romp through many different fields of mathematics as he incorporates ancient discoveries and modern developments alike. Topics include geometry, number theory, the development of sudoku, numerous aspects of pi and its calculation, statistics, probability and its application to gambling, and many other historical tidbits. VERDICT In general, Bellos is cheerful, informative, and entertaining. All of the material will be within the reach of nearly all readers, including those whose formal math education ended in secondary school. The illustrations are clear and helpful. Strongly recommended for public and undergraduate college libraries.Jack W. Weigel, Ann Arbor, MI

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2010
An expansive overview of numbers and figures, and those who find them irresistible.

Though he has an Oxford degree in math, former Guardian reporter Bellos (Futebol: Soccer: The Brazilian Way, 2002) approaches the subject as an enthusiastic amateur. He begins at the most basic level, with the concept of number itself, looking at the ways children, tribal cultures and animals deal with the idea of quantity. Perhaps not surprisingly, an ability to recognize which of two trees bears the most fruit seems to predate the ability to count. Cultural differences appear even in mathematically advanced societies, and the conventional system of base ten math is only one of several ways to break up the number system, with binary math probably the best known alternative. For arithmetic, Bellos looks at Japanese abacus experts, who can add columns of numbers faster than a calculator, and the Vedic math promoted by an Indian sect, which offers advanced algorithms for multiplication and other troublesome operations. Geometry also provides plenty of material, from the Pythagorean theorem to origami to the"golden ratio" beloved by architects and artists. A chapter on logarithms leads to a discussion of slide rules, the first choice for scientists and technicians requiring a quick answer until the pocket calculator drove it out of favor. Another chapter provides a lucid discussion of statistics and the famous bell curve. Recreational math gets its due, as well, with nods to Sudoku, Rubik's Cube and the master puzzler Martin Gardner. The final chapter examines infinities and non-Euclidean geometry. Bellos maintains focus on the people who have created math and who have used it creatively, from the famous Greeks to Renaissance figures like Descartes and Fermat, and 19th-century giants like Gauss and Poincar. Readers desiring more will find online appendices that treat the concepts more rigorously, with proofs where relevant. However, most readers who remember high-school math can follow the clear and entertaining accounts.

A smorgasbord for math fans of all abilities.

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