Alex's Adventures in Numberland

Bloody hell, What a book!! 

 I did a maths degree over 20 years ago and I often wonder why I did.   But then I read a book like this and it all makes sense.  This book was perfect; full of interesting history, facts and ideas that made my head spin and yes, the pure beauty and wonder  of maths shined through. (Really, it did!) 

I haven't just read this book I have thought about it for days.  I feel like I have re-connected with an old weird friend who I last chatted to over 20 years ago. I think it's both  the humour and the passion of the writer which makes this book outstanding for me. Yes, parts of it are funny because mathematicians through history are completely bonkers.  I grabbed it off the shelf in the library at the last minute and the first thing I am going to do after I return it is buy myself a copy.

It starts with the history of counting and how some tribes in the world have no numbers greater than two in their language.It talks for a while on different counting systems and how an ancient people from Babylon had a number system based around 60.  (They left us with the system we use for time.  60 minutes in an hour.) It moves on to the first  writing, which was accountants tallying up pints of beer. Counting was perfected as an art form by the Japanese and Chinese on the abacus and the notation was developed by the Indians . The Indians were the first people to use zero. The concept of using a symbol to show the idea of nothing was beyond the Greeks, Chinese and Babylonians.

Roman Numerals were no good for addition and the fight to get the Arabic /Indian number system into the West was interesting because during the 7th century the West had just started fighting the Islamic world. The West was envious that their grasp of mathematical notation was better and hence science, engineering and astrology was so much further advanced in the Islamic world   It  all came down to their representation of 'nothing' and  their simple number placement which we take for granted now.

Indians call 'Slumdog Millionaire' 'Slumdog Crorepati' due to having a unique counting terminology and a system which goes back to Buddha. Buddha was the first philosophical mathematician who sat around thinking about very small and very big numbers. Now it has been proven  that he got his estimates for the size of an atom and the size of the Universe almost correct. Buddha was the first, and probably only, man to hold a perfect image of the smallest and largest objects known to man in his mind without any mathematical proof.

The book then moves away from numbers and into my favourite world of geometry and shape. He talks about the beauty and sophistication of Islamic tiles as a representation of God through art and then moves on to  the 50 pence piece.  British mathematicians and members of the blind community lobbied for the 7 sided coin,  which was the first  curved heptagon coin in the world.

 I love the bit on how paper folding is the only way to prove mathematical problems which completely stumped the Greeks. The Delian problem is one such mind bender

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubling_the_cube

 I loved this because it was all new to me and made me realise how  folding a piece of paper can solve problems which the Greeks couldn't solve.  (How sad am I.) 

The book is still not even half through at this stage and I'm in total awe and think my head is going to explode with information but I take a deep breath and carry on.

We move on to shapes that have no volume and infinite surface area.  They are called Menger Sponges and kind of freaked me out. ( Like when you put  a mirror on your head and look at yourself in another mirror.) Some maths nutter in the States decided to make a third level Menger Sponge out of  66,000 business cards.  They are painstakingly created from small 3D units and took her and her friends over 7 years to make. (again it all goes back to origami.)  This woman is a complete and absolute mentalist.

http://www.theiff.org/oexhibits/menger02.html

If she made a level 4 Menger Sponge it would take over a million cards and weigh a ton, hence it couldn't support its own weight. She didn't attempt it. In the world of pure maths a Menger Sponge continues for infinity, in reality it stops after the number 3.

The book then went on to talk to people who were banned from casinos because of their mathematical wizardry at the poker table. A pretty useful skill.

The  golden ratio was also covered.  This  ratio is the number of life, beauty and science. It's found in art, architecture, graphics, photo composition, personal beauty, dental cosmetics, the stock market (?) and the graph of a heart beat. It's also the same ratio we use when converting kilometres to miles.

Eddy Levin with his golden gauge was pretty mental!  Mr Levin was a dentist from North London who decided to use this gauge to help him make false teeth in  the best proportion.  His gauge is totally ridiculous but proves the point about how many things are created in this ratio.

http://www.goldenmeangauge.co.uk/

I love how the gauge is so UGLY but the proportion he is measuring is the height of  balance and beauty!

The best part of the book was at the end.  (If you are still here this is the bit which really got me going!)

In my degree I loved spherical geometry.  This is  simply drawing shapes on balloons and globes and seeing what happens to lines and angles.(Plotting trajectories of aeroplanes round the world and that kind of stuff.)  I loved all this nonsense but then we also moved on to think about hyperbolic space. Hyperbolic space is constant negative curvature.  A shape which never joins up to itself and also has  a vast surface area. (like a pringle in its simplest form.)    Wonderful  things happen in hyperbolic space but it was all beyond me at university  because I couldn't imagine the structure. We never had models to work with.   No one ever told me that sea coral,  lettuce,  even delicious CURLY KALE  are all simple hyperbolic structures. Natural objects often need to maximise their surface area so they can take in sunlight and nutrients efficiently.

Now the great thing is in 1997 a  mathematician decided she wanted to learn more about hyperbolic structures so she could teach the subject better. Many of the students were also having problems getting their heads round the subject, so she decided to crochet herself some!  She took the geometry world by storm. No one had ever thought of this simple solution before. (I suppose not many mathematic professors crochet in their free time.)   She is my hero  and I might begin to crochet my own structures soon.    I might finally be able to understand something that I never thought I would. 

What a book!  Thank you Alex Bellos for writing this. You have inspired me and reminded me why, underneath it all, I still am completely in love with and in awe of maths.   Right , I'm off to find my crochet  hook.

http://crochetcoralreef.org/contributors/daina_taimina.php

http://theiff.org/press/NYTcrochet.html

http://crochetcoralreef.org/Content/makeyourown/IFF-CrochetReef-HowToHandout.pdf

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Thanks Helen Corbett for recommending this to me.  I ordered it from the library and have devoured it in less than a week.  What fun it was and it's put me in a really good mood. (Two fun and mental books in a row!) This book had to be read in print format because it was full of the most weird and bizarre old photos, which had been lovingly collected and cared for by the author and others.

They are really odd and freaky pictures which the author uses to add atmosphere and a cinematic edge to his completely bonkers story.  The pictures themselves are totally bizarre but make complete sense when you enter into the kind of X-men world off this unknown (made up?) island off the coast of Wales.

The American teenage hero witnesses the murder of his Grandad and vows to travel to the Children's home on a far flung Welsh Island to find out the history and reason behind his Grandad's interesting life and violent death.

This book is American, and the first part is set in Florida, I loved the descriptions of life on a housing estate for a teenager in downtown Miami. I especially liked his descriptions of the multi ethnic  Santas on his neighbours roof! 

The jump to village life in Wales is  a really off the wall shift but it works.  I loved it. I  haven't whipped through a book so quickly in ages! It is written for a teenage audience but even so parts of it are pretty grim.  You do need a strong stomach.  (Especially when you see the kid in action whose specific peculiarity is bringing dead people back to life by inserting fresh cow and sheep hearts into their cadavers! ) Parts of it reminded me of an American Werewolf in London, other bits were X-men, other bits a bit Enid Blyton'! . But the story itself was really inventive and based around a  24 hour time loop stuck on 3rd September 1940, which is accessible from the back of a cave on this weird Welsh Island. All of the kids are safely cocooned within this time loop, lovely reset every evening by Miss Peregrine, who is a woman who can change to a peregrine falcon. 

I loved this guy's writing style.  It was really good fun and totally and absolutely off the wall! OK , it's written for teenagers but hey, no worries that's what I still am at heart and it instantly took me back to the feeling I got when I sucked up books like a hoover when I was 13.

Nights at the Circus

Oh my God, what a ridiculous, bonkers, clever, funny, wonderful book.  YES, I loved it and it's definitely my book of the year so far. Angela Carter writes like a maniac on psychedelic drugs and often just reading her sentences is like tripping out in a linguistic circus.   But hey, I liked that and it didn't bother me that sometimes I didn't understand everything.   In fact the end is so crazy I don't think you are meant to understand it!
Reading this was great fun.  the characters are amazing and their adventures are outrageous.
A woman called  Fevvers  (feathers in cockney) tells a young American journalist about how she ended up being the greatest aerialist at the end of the 19th century.  She was born with wings, abandoned andbought up in a brothel, after this she was sold to a museum of curiosities run by a hideous skeletal woman. She finally ends up joining the circus and despite being more than 6 foot tall  and massive (with wings)  she becomes the sensation of the moment.
The journalist wants to get to the bottom of how she has 'conned' the nation but instead he ends up falling for her charms and becomes besotted with her.
Her circus is planning a tour across, Siberia and into Japan so the journalist gets a position incognito as a rather crap clown.  He secretly writes newspaper articles and lives in poverty with the other clowns and some peasants whilst Fevvers lives the high life in five star hotels. The book is full of totally crazy characters: Educated apes who can write and draw up plans of their evening shows. (They are also desperate to gain their freedom from the circus.)   A psychic pig  from Texas who can predict the future.  A mad Count who wants to entrap Fevvers and force her to live as a toy in his mansion. An evil female prison warden who has the most cruel and vile prison for female murderers ever imagined. Shamens and outlaws from the depths of Siberia, Italian suffragettes and of course manically depressed clowns.

I know that Angela Carter studied English for years and years  and was HUGELY 'clever' and 'literary' and that there are lots of supposed messages in this book but to be honest I didn't really get it on that level and read it as an enjoyable mad story.  The only bit that did confuse me was the end...but hey, maybe when I read it again I'll understand it!

What I loved the most about this book is her openness about human characters. She's harsh on both sexes and is honest about how good and also how cruel humans can be to each other. I got a great sense of how much she must have enjoyed writing this book.  It was a bit like reading an improved version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.