The highest found (at the time of publication of the book) was 2 Bellos starts his tour of the mathematical world with some anthropology, asking whether numbers are something natural to humans, or whether they are learned and constructed. From the world's fastest mental calculators in Germany to numerologists in the US desert, from a startlingly numerate chimpanzee in Japan to venerable Hindu sages in India, these dispatches from 'Numberland' are an unlikely but exhilarating cocktail of history, reportage and mathematical proofs. He commences by describing how different cultures use counting and numbers, and in many ways this is the most interesting part of the book. Strings of data are dull, you might think, percentages and sums best left to calculators (or, these days, Google).

The chapter uses maths to confirm that there are a few clever clogs who can improve gambling odds but the rest of us are easy prey to owners of casinos whose only redeeming quality is that they are as stupid as the rest of us in understanding how probability theory works and must therefore put their faith in the quants they employ, much like the purchasers of derivatives products. In December 2009, the record for determining the digital expansion of pi was broken, and now stands at 2. Registered office address: Unit 34 Vulcan House Business Centre, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EF.The record for pi memorisation whilst juggling is held by Mats Bergsten (Sweden) who has recited 9778 digits while juggling three balls. In probing the many intrigues of that most beloved of numbers, pi, he visits with two brothers so obsessed with the elusive number that they built a supercomputer in their Manhattan apartment to study it. Instead, he effortlessly reveals the truth of just how fascinating, how human, how intensely interesting this subject (and its history) really is. There have been books about the history of mathematics before and, I hope, there will be many more in the future.

Bellos has traveled all around the globe and has plunged into history to uncover fascinating stories of mathematical achievement, from the breakthroughs of Euclid, the greatest mathematician of all time, to the creations of the Zen master of origami, one of the hottest areas of mathematical work today. On one hand it’s an easy read, a beach read if you will, and it covers quite a lot of math’s ground in relatively little space. Mathematical thought is one of the great achievements of the human race, and arguably the foundation of all human progress.And this book is also an answer (without actually trying to be) to all those people who ask – 'Why do we learn math if it has no real application in life? I now know that the maths of the shape of the fifty pence coin is much less interesting than I might have imagined, also that gambling is a mugs game - think I knew that from playing penny up at school or cards with my card counting father, and that the variability of weight of loaves of bread may be affected by sample variance and local factors as much as by the baker making smaller loaves. He's juggling hardcore mathematics, entertaining (and often humorous) anecdotes and practical applications of math at the same time!

Alex Bellos attempts to engage the general public in mathematics by describing maths in a way that anyone can understand. I'm an engineer, so I might be slightly better positioned to understand this text, but the format and language of the book assumes nothing of the reader (without being condescending) and explains every concept in a way that even a lay person will be able to follow.A conditional recommendation for people who like to brush up on their maths and not beaten up by formulas. He has organized the book in the way that allows him to be chronological while also taking diversions from time to time to connect with what's happening now in the field of mathematics.

They have no need to count lots of things and, indeed, see counting endlessly as a ludicrous activity. He eats a potato crisp whose revolutionary shape was unpalatable to the ancient Greeks, and he shows the deep connections between maths, religion and philosophy. Logarithms exposed the limitations of a brain that can memorise useless facts but could not hope to make the abstract concrete in a month of infinite Sundays. I also liked that Bellos does not revert to hyperbolic fan's zeal to inspire the same passion in the reader.As the book progresses, so does the abstract nature of the subject matter, and the concept of pi provides the perfect bridge between numeracy and philosophy, which had already emerged with the chapter on zero. The chapter on Vedic Mathematics was insightful, but I still do not see how this method can be considered easier than the traditional method I was taught. Our counting numbers (1, 2, 3, etc) are probably less than 10,000 years old, an offshoot of language, and there were probably no more than a handful of these discrete units for most of that time. To usher the reader into the 20th century Bellos explores the ideas of Georg Cantor and David Hilbert on infinity. When I saw this book on one of my frequent browses I thought that sounds right up my street so bought it (it had good reviews).