Broadcaster and science geek Adam Spencer is back with another light-hearted but enlightening romp through the world of numbers in this volume following from last year’s bestseller, the Big Book of Numbers.
Numbers are everywhere, with a crucial role to play in sport, cooking, history and music as well as the more obvious fields of astronomy, computing and finance.
Spencer introduces us to all sorts of characters from Gauss to Martin Gardner, John Glenn to Hermann Göring and Jimi Hendrix. It says something for a book less than 400 pages long that it can explain what the phrase “at sixes and sevens” means in one breath while analysing Shakespeare by the numbers in another.
Spencer explains the book’s philosophy. “The world is an incredible place – full of amazing things to know – and at the heart of both understanding the world and in describing what we know to each other, are numbers.” He says exploring those numbers is “one of the most enjoyable things you can possibly do while you’re on this orb moving at crazy-fast speeds through the Milky Way”.
There is more about Spencer and the book on his website
Originally published by Cosmos as Book: Adam Spencer’s World of Numbers
Bill Condie
Bill Condie is a science journalist based in Adelaide, Australia.
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