Thinking In Numbers: On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math
*Starred Review* With these words from a fellow mathematician, “There is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics,” Tammet describes the magical realms he explores in these 25 wonderful essays. Here numbers become portals to “pure possibilities” in the “math of life.” Smashing preconceptions of mathematics as a task for drudges, Tammet takes prime numbers as a key for unlocking haiku by Basho and shares the emotion-laden colors surging through his mind when, as a “number artist,” he sets a European record by reciting the value of pi to 22,514 decimal places. Tammet visits the pure possibilities in mathematics that inspire poetry, drama, and even theology. But the tether of impure reality tugs the author back into a world where impoverished grandparents suffer the indignity of eviction, their furniture scattered across the front lawn; a world where his mother manages Christmas for a large family only by scouring neighborhood garage sales. But then, perhaps, it is precisely in the tension between math’s sublime dreamscapes and the terrestrial numbers of working-class budgets that readers truly see the “math of life.” Admirers of Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day (2007) and Embracing the Wide Sky (2009) will find here fresh reasons to laud the author’s gifts. --Bryce Christensen