Here's Looking at Euclid: From Counting Ants to Games of Chance - An Awe-Inspiring Journey Through the World of Numbers
At last, a math book for people who think they don't like math. Alex Bellos's self-proclaimed "Surprising Excursion Through the Astonishing World of Math" delivers on its promise. You'll meet the numerologist who persuaded Puff Daddy to change his name, a Romanian probability theorist who parlayed his know-how into enough lotteries wins to fund an early retirement in the South Pacific, and the nine-year-old Japanese prodigy who can play a speed-game in which two players quickly alternate saying a word that begins with the last word's last syllable while simultaneously summing 30 three-digits numbers--in20 seconds!You'll learn about tangrams, piems, hyperbolic crochet, nature's ubiquitous "golden ratio," the spooky dogma of the bell curve, why origami is on the bleeding edge of theoretical mathematics, how to make $250,000 in the search for ever-larger prime numbers, and how to gamble just a little bit less badly. We missed this book in 2010's "best of" lists, but it's never too late to have this much fun. --Jason Kirk--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.