Number Story: From Counting to Cryptography

by Peter Michael Higgins

Numbers have fascinated people for centuries. They are familiar to everyone, forming a central pillar of our understanding of the world, yet the number system was not presented to us “gift-wrapped” but, rather, was developed over millennia. Peter Higgins distills centuries of work into one delightful narrative that celebrates the mystery of numbers and explains how different kinds of numbers arose and why they are useful. Full of historical snippets and interesting examples, the book ranges from simple number puzzles and magic tricks, to showing how ideas about numbers relate to real-world problems, such How are our bank account details kept secure when shopping over the internet? What are the chances of winning at Russian roulette; or of being dealt a flush in a poker hand?
As our understanding of numbers continues to evolve, this book invites us to rediscover the mystery and beauty of numbers and reminds us that the story of numbers is a tale with a long way to run...

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Mathematics, Reference

334 pages, Hardcover

First published February 25, 2008

Reviews

[Nick Huntington-Klein · Rating 2 out of 5]

An extremely confusingly written book. I already knew most of the mathematical content before picking it up and I still had frequent difficulties following along. His examples often serve to make concepts more difficult, not less.

The high points of the book are the brief humanizing stories given to some of the mathematicians, and the two chapters on complex numbers and encryption. Still, both of those chapters are difficult to follow, the complex numbers chapter has some weird choices of examples and explains the examples it does have too little, and I imagine there's likely a better pop math source for both. There are a number of mathematical tricks and truths that will dazzle in the other chapters, but you've likely seen them all before if you're into math enough to read a book about it.

The book appears to have run up against a deadline, as the quality of editing flags badly in the later chapters, with a fair amount of repetitive bloat and a large number of typos.

[Matthew Talbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really interesting book. Probably what I got most from it was the history of math. In particular, little details about how the Egyptians only considered fractions with a numerator of 1, or how most people didn't understand decimals at all until a couple hundred years ago, were really fascinating to me.