Numbers (Ten Things You Should Know)

Numbers (Ten Things You Should Know) - Colin Stuart ****

Short, smart-looking hardback books (ideally with the number of topics in the title) continue to go down well in popular science and maths fields, and Colin Stuart's new title on some of the more fun and mind-bending aspects of numbers is one of the better examples of the format. We get ten compact, standalone chapters on the likes of counting, zero, prime numbers, cake cutting and infinity - and each works well as a tasty little mental snack.

If you've read any popular maths titles, some of what's covered here may already be familiar, but Stuart's excellent storytelling gives us a new twist on many of them, and even when they have been frequently encountered before (for example, the Monty Hall problem or there being more than one 'size' of infinity), the approach is fresh enough to still be enjoyable.

Although the title makes this about numbers - and certainly they form a significant part of the book - they are by no means everything. Leaving aside infinity not being a number (as Stuart admits), we get things like circles having an infinite set of sides, non-Euclidean geometry and graph theory. All this with hardly anything that most readers will recognise as being maths. I wish that the kind of content that Stuart presents here made up more of the school mathematics syllabus - we'd have a lot more people interested in the subject.

If I'm going to be picky there were a couple of times, notably when dealing with infinity-related topics, where the necessary simplification for a book like this meant that's what said isn't strictly accurate (for example describing the infinity of the continuum as aleph 1), but nothing that really matters to anyone other than a pedant.

Overall, a fun little book for anyone from an adult who thought maths was boring to a teenager who has shown an interest in the topic.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

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