Alex Bellos

The Triumph of Numbers

by I B Cohen

“But this one – very short – was only published after he died. Again, the difficulty in maths writing is often that the mathematicians don’t know how to write and the non-mathematicians don’t really get the maths. But Cohen is an amazing historian, so although what he has chosen is a massive subject, he has only nine chapters which are nine moments in the history of numbers.” — via Interview, November 2012

The History of Pi

by Petr Beckmann

“Petr Beckmann was a Czech electrical engineer who lived in Czechoslovakia until he was 39 in 1963, when he went to America as a visiting professor and just stayed there.” — via Interview, November 2012

The Man Who Counted

by Malba Tahan · Fiction

“He was huge. So in Brazil when I told friends, ‘I’m now working on maths,’ they all said, ‘Oh, you must read Malba Tahan.’ And friends who were kids during that era said, ‘Oh, I remember my parents reading it to me’ – it’s almost like Alice in Wonderland in that it is one of the things that makes people feel nostalgic about their childhood. My Brazilian copy is the 74th edition.” — via Interview, November 2012

Zero

The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

by Charles Seife

“But Seife says the other reason, spiritually or religiously, that we were afraid of infinity and zero and the reason that India got zero, was that Western religions thought there has to be God everywhere.” — via Interview, November 2012

The Universal History of Numbers

From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer

by Georges Ifrah

“Then halfway through it changes and becomes largely about India because Ifrah realises that our own number system really originated in India. Our number system being what we call Arabic numerals and which are really Indian numerals.” — via Interview, November 2012