Alex's Adventure In Numberland

447 Pages·7.684 MB·English

by  Alex Bellos

ALEX’S ADVENTURES IN NUMBERLAND
ALEX’S ADVENTURES IN NUMBERLAND
ALEX BELLOS
For my mother and father
First published in Great Britain in 2010
Copyright © 2010 by Alex Bellos
Illustrations © 2010 by Andy Riley The moral right of the author has been
asserted
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Mathematical diagrams by Oxford Designers and Illustrators All papers used by
Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown
in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the
environmental regulations of the country of origin.
www.bloomsbury.com/alexbellos
Plate Section Picture Credits:
p. 1 (top), p. 1 (bottom), p. 6 (top), p. 6 (bottom), p. 7 (top), p. 7 (bottom), p. 12
(top), p. 15 (top), p. 15 (bottom), p. 16 (top) © Alex Bellos; pp. 2–3 SR Euclid
Collection, UCL Library Services, Special Collections; p. 4 (top), p. 4 (bottom)
© Robert Lang; p. 5 (top) © Eva Madrazo, 2009. Used under license from
Shutterstock.com; p. 5 (bottom) © Neil Mason; p. 8 Le Casse-tête en portraits,
Gandais, Paris, 1818, from the Slocum Puzzle Collection, Lilly Library; p. 9
Thanks to Jerry Slocum; p. 10 (top left), p. 10 (top right), p. 10 (bottom left), p.
10 (bottom right), p. 11 © Christopher Lane; p. 12 (bottom), p. 13 Thanks to
Eddy Levin; p. 14 © FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009; p. 16
(bottom) © Daina Taimina.
Contents

Introduction
CHAPTER ZERO
A Head for Numbers
In which the author tries to find out where numbers come from, since they
haven’t been around that long. He meets a man who has lived in the jungle and
a chimpanzee who has always lived in the city.
CHAPTER ONE
The Counter Culture
In which the author learns about the tyranny of ten, and the revolutionaries
plotting its downfall. He goes to an after-school club in Tokyo, where the pupils
learn to calculate by thinking about beads.
CHAPTER TWO
Behold!
In which the author almost changes his name because the disciple of a Greek
cult leader says he must. Instead, he follows the instructions of another Greek
thinker, dusts off his compass and folds two business cards into a tetrahedron.
CHAPTER THREE
Something about Nothing
In which the author travels to India for an audience with a Hindu seer. He
discovers some very slow methods of arithmetic and some very fast ones.
CHAPTER FOUR
Life of Pi
In which the author is in Germany to witness the world’s fastest mental
multiplication. It is a roundabout way to begin telling the story of circles, a
transcendental tale that leads him to New York and a new appreciation of the
50p piece.
CHAPTER FIVE
The x-factor
In which the author explains why numbers are good but letters are better. He
visits a man in Braintree who collects slide-rules and hears the tragic tale of
their demise. Includes an exposition of logarithms, a dictionary of calculator
words and how to make a superegg.
CHAPTER SIX
Playtime
In which the author is on a mathematical puzzle quest. He investigates the
legacy of two Chinese men – one was a dim-witted recluse and the other fell off
the Earth – and then flies to Oklahoma to meet a magician.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Secrets of Succession
In which the author is first confronted with the infinite. He encounters an
unstoppable snail and a devilish family of numbers.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Gold Finger
In which the author meets a Londoner with a claw who claims to have
discovered the secret of beautiful teeth.
CHAPTER NINE
Chance is a Fine Thing
In which the author remembers the dukes of hasard and goes gambling in Reno.
He takes a walk through randomness and ends up in an office block in Newport
Beach, California – where, if he looked across the ocean, he might be able to
spot a lottery winner on a desert island in the South Pacific.
CHAPTER TEN
Situation Normal
In which the author’s farinaceous overindulgence is an attempt to savour the
birth of statistics.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The End of the Line
In which the author terminates his journey with crisps and crochet. He’s looking
at Euclid, again, and then at a hotel with an infinite number of rooms that
cannot cope with a sudden influx of guests.
GLOSSARY
APPENDICES
NOTES ON CHAPTERS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PICTURE CREDITS
Introduction

In the summer of 1992 I was working as a cub reporter at the Evening Argus in
Brighton. My days were spent watching recidivist teenagers appear at the local
magistrates court, interviewing shopkeepers about the recession and, twice a
week, updating the opening hours of the Bluebell Railway for the paper’s
listings page. It wasn’t a great time if you were a petty thief, or a shopkeeper, but
for me it was a happy period in my life.
John Major had recently been re-elected as prime minister and, flush from
victory, he delivered one of his most remembered (and ridiculed) policy
initiatives. With presidential seriousness, he announced the creation of a
telephone hotline for information about traffic cones – a banal proposal dressed
up as if the future of the world depended on it.
In Brighton, however, cones were big news. You couldn’t drive into town
without getting stuck in roadworksThe main route from London – the A23 (M) –
was a corridor of striped orange cones all the way from Crawley to Preston Park.
With its tongue firmly in its cheek, the Argus challenged its readers to guess the
number of cones that lined the many miles of the A23 (M). Senior staff
congratulated themselves on such a brilliant idea. The village fête-style
challenge explained the story while also poking fun at central government:
perfect local-paper stuff.
Yet only a few hours after the competition was launched, the first entry was
received, and in it the reader had guessed the correct number of cones. I
remember the senior editors sitting in dejected silence in the newsroom, as if an
important local councillor had just died. They had aimed to parody the prime
minister, but it was they who had been made to look like fools.
The editors had assumed that guessing how many cones there were on 20 or
so miles of motorway was an impossible task. It self-evidently wasn’t and I think
I was the only person in the building who could see why. Assuming that cones