The Grapes of Math: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life - Hardcover

Bellos, Alex

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1451640099 ISBN 13: 9781451640090

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

From the bestselling author of Here’s Looking at Euclid, a dazzling new book that turns even the most complex math into a brilliantly entertaining narrative.

From triangles, rotations and power laws, to cones, curves and the dreaded calculus, Alex takes you on a journey of mathematical discovery with his signature wit and limitless enthusiasm. He sifts through over 30,000 survey submissions to uncover the world’s favourite number, and meets a mathematician who looks for universes in his garage. He attends the World Mathematical Congress in India, and visits the engineer who designed the first roller-coaster loop.

Get hooked on math as Alex delves deep into humankind’s turbulent relationship with numbers, and reveals how they have shaped the world we live in.

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Alex Bellos has a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from Oxford University. Curator-in-residence at the Science Museum and the Guardian’s math blogger, he has worked in London and Rio de Janeiro, where he was the paper's unusually numerate foreign correspondent. In 2002 he wrote Futebol, a critically acclaimed book about Brazilian football, and in 2006 he ghostwrote Pelé's autobiography, which was a number one bestseller. Here’s Looking at Euclid was shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize and was a Sunday Times bestseller for more than four months.

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The Grapes of Math

CHAPTER ONE

Every Number Tells a Story

Jerry Newport asked me to pick a four-digit number.

“2761,” I said.

“That’s 11 × 251,” he replied, reciting the numbers in one continuous, unhesitant flow.

“2762. That’s 2 × 1381.

“2763. That’s 3 × 3 × 307.

“2764. That’s 2 × 2 × 691.”

Jerry is a retired taxi driver from Tucson, Arizona, with Asperger’s syndrome. He has a ruddy complexion and small blue eyes, his large forehead sliced by a diagonal comb of dark blond hair. He likes birds as well as numbers, and when we met he was wearing a flowery red shirt with a parrot on it. We were sitting in his living room, together with a cockatoo, a dove, three parakeets and two cockatiels, which were also listening to, and occasionally repeating, our conversation.

As soon as Jerry sees a big number, he divides it up into prime numbers, which are those numbers—2, 3, 5, 7, 11 . . .—that can be divided only by themselves and 1. This habit made his former job driving cabs particularly enjoyable, since there was always a number on the license plate in front of him. When he lived in Santa Monica, where license numbers were four and five digits long, he would often visit the four-story car park of his local mall and not leave until he had worked through every plate.

In Tucson, however, car numbers are only three digits long. He barely glances at them now.

“If the number is more than four digits I’ll start to pay attention to it. If it’s four digits or less, it’s roadkill. It is!” he remonstrated. “Come on! Show me something new!”

Asperger’s is a psychological disorder in which social awkwardness can coexist with extreme abilities, such as, in Jerry’s case, an extraordinary talent for mental arithmetic. In 2010 he competed at the Mental Calculation World Cup in Germany having done no preparation. He won the overall title of Most Versatile Calculator, the only contestant to score full marks in the category where 19 five-digit numbers have to be decomposed into their constituent primes in ten minutes. No one else got even close.

Jerry’s system for breaking down large numbers is to sieve out the prime numbers in ascending order, extracting a 2 if the number is even, extracting a 3 if it divides by three, a 5 if it divides by five, and so on.

He raised his voice to a yell: “Oh yeah, we’re sievin’, baby!” He started moving his body around: “We’re onstage. Throw those numbers out, crowd, and we’ll sieve ’em for ya! Yeah! Jerry and the Sievers!”

“I’ve got a pair of sievers,” interrupted his wife, Mary, who was sitting on the sofa next to us. Mary, a musician and former Star Trek extra, also has Asperger’s, which is much less common in women than it is in men. A marriage between two people with Asperger’s is very rare, and their unconventional romance was turned into the 2005 Hollywood movie Mozart and the Whale.

Sometimes Jerry cannot extract any primes at all from a large number, which means the number is itself prime. When this happens it gives him a thrill: “If it’s a prime number I’ve never found before, it’s kinda like if you were looking for rocks, and you’ve found a new rock. Something like a diamond you can take home and put on your shelf.”

He paused. “A new prime number—it’s like having a new friend.”

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The earliest words and symbols used for numbers date from about 5000 years ago in Sumer, a region in what is now Iraq. The Sumerians did not look far when coming up with names. The word for one, ges, also meant man, or erect phallus. The word for two, min, also meant woman, symbolic of the male being primary and the woman his complement, or perhaps describing a penis and a pair of breasts.

Initially, numbers served a practical purpose, like counting sheep and calculating taxes. Yet numbers also revealed abstract patterns, which made them objects of deep contemplation. Perhaps the earliest mathematical discovery was that numbers come in two types, even and odd: those that can be halved cleanly, such as 2, 4 and 6, and those that cannot, such as 1, 3 and 5. The Greek teacher Pythagoras, who lived in the sixth century BCE, echoed the Sumerian association of one with man and two with woman by proclaiming odd numbers masculine and even numbers feminine. Resistance to splitting in two, he argued, embodied strength, while susceptibility to splitting in two was a weakness. He gave a further arithmetical justification: odd was master over even, just as man is master over woman, because when you add an odd number to an even number, the answer remains odd.

Pythagoras is most famous for his theorem about triangles, which we will come to later. But his belief about number gender has dominated Western thought for more than two thousand years. Christianity embraced it within its creation myth: God created Adam first, and Eve second. One signifies unity, and two is the “sin which deviates from the First Good.” For the medieval Church, odd numbers were stronger, better, more godly and luckier than the evens, and by Shakespeare’s time, metaphysical beliefs about odd numbers were common: “They say there is divinity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance or death,” Falstaff declares in The Merry Wives of Windsor. These superstitions remain. Mystical numbers still tend to be odd, notably the “magic” three, the “lucky” seven, and the “unlucky” thirteen.

Shakespeare is also responsible for popularizing the modern meaning of “odd.” Originally, the word had only a numerical sense. It was used in phrases such as “odd man out,” the unpaired member of a group of three. But in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the farcical Spaniard Don Adriano de Armado is described as “too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were.” Having one left over when divided by two has meant peculiar ever since.

–––

It is human nature to be sensitive to numerical patterns. These patterns provoke subjective responses, sometimes extreme ones, as we saw with Jerry Newport, but also more generally, leading to deeply held cultural associations. Oriental philosophy is based on an appreciation of the dualities in nature, symbolized by yin and yang, literally “shadow” and “light.” Yin is associated with passivity, femininity, the moon, misfortune and even numbers, and yang with their complements: aggressiveness, masculinity, the sun, good fortune and odd numbers. Again, we see a historic link between luck and oddness, and this link is especially strong in Japan, where, for example, it is customary to give three, five or seven items as a gift. Never four or six. In giving cash to newlyweds, the amounts ¥30,000, ¥50,000 and ¥100,000 are preferred, although ¥20,000 is acceptable, in which case the recommendation is to “odd things out” by dividing the value into one ¥10,000 and two ¥5,000 bills. The aesthetics of odd numbers also underpins the Japanese classical art of flower arranging, ikebana, which uses only odd numbers of items, an influence of the Buddhist belief that asymmetry reflects nature. A meal of Japanese haute cuisine, kaiseki, always comprises an odd number of dishes, and, just so kids get the message early on, the annual celebration of youthful good health is called the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1451640099
• ISBN 13: 9781451640090
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar