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    Alex Through the Looking-Glass: How Life Reflects Numbers, and Numbers Reflect Life
    Unavailable
    Alex Through the Looking-Glass: How Life Reflects Numbers, and Numbers Reflect Life
    Unavailable
    Alex Through the Looking-Glass: How Life Reflects Numbers, and Numbers Reflect Life
    Ebook464 pages6 hours

    Alex Through the Looking-Glass: How Life Reflects Numbers, and Numbers Reflect Life

    By Alex Bellos

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    From triangles, rotations and power laws, to fractals, cones and curves, bestselling author Alex Bellos takes you on a journey of mathematical discovery with his signature wit, engaging stories and limitless enthusiasm. As he narrates a series of eye-opening encounters with lively personalities all over the world, Alex demonstrates how numbers have come to be our friends, are fascinating and extremely accessible, and how they have changed our world.

    He turns even the dreaded calculus into an easy-to-grasp mathematical exposition, and sifts through over 30,000 survey submissions to reveal the world's favourite number. In Germany, he meets the engineer who designed the first roller-coaster loop, whilst in India he joins the world's highly numerate community at the International Congress of Mathematicians. He explores the wonders behind the Game of Life program, and explains mathematical logic, growth and negative numbers. Stateside, he hangs out with a private detective in Oregon and meets the mathematician who looks for universes from his garage in Illinois.

    Read this captivating book, and you won't realise that you're learning about complex concepts. Alex will get you hooked on maths as he delves deep into humankind's turbulent relationship with numbers, and proves just how much fun we can have with them.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateApr 15, 2014
    ISBN9781408845752
    Unavailable
    Alex Through the Looking-Glass: How Life Reflects Numbers, and Numbers Reflect Life
    Author

    Alex Bellos

    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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    Reviews for Alex Through the Looking-Glass

    4/5

    41 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Much more technical then his first book, but consequently more informative as well. Excellent as both a refresher for forgotten material and as an introduction to new concepts. Discussion of set theory, pi (and its would be replacement tau), logarithms, negative roots and calculus are some of the highlights.
    • 5/5
      As we all well know, we have a Love hate relationship with Math. We either love Math or Love to hate it. Well, here is a book that you will love regardless of which group you fall under!I enjoyed every chapter and was just astounded by some of the things I read. More importantly, I found Alex Bellos explaining really tough concepts in a fashion that one could understand even with a very basic knowledge of Math. If you've always been somewhat scared of Math but wanted to learn more this book is the perfect answer; and if you're a Math lover/Geek you will love this book too.
    • 3/5
      You mention maths to people and they either think Mental Abuse To Humans or run screaming from the room. But we are surrounded by numbers, they are in the things that we read, play a key role in everything we do online and the wonders of a simple cone.

      In this book Bellos draws out the stories behind the numbers. We learn how simple triangulation allows us to move around the country with maps and sat nav. How exponential growth is the key number behind You Tube sensations and Catalan architecture. We meet those playing the game of life are beginning to understand the deepest complexities of life from a simple computer programme and how a simple mathematical law can catch the financial crook, and we discover just what peoples favourite number are.

      It is a reasonably accessible book too, even for those that normal turn a paler shade when the word maths is mentioned. He does drift of into the delights of calculus in one chapter, but all of the others are well explained, understandable, and may even make you smile every now and again.
    • 4/5
      Alex Bellos has a knack for whimsical book titles (his previous book was Here’s Looking at Euclid) and for making math interesting. In The Grapes of Math, he covers a wide range of only tangentially (get it?) related topics like how parabolas differ from catenaries, the area under a cycloid, and an understandable derivation of Euler’s almost mystical eponymous equation. The transcendental numbers pi, e, and i each gets its own chapter along with a succinct, lucid explication of the nature and history of calculus. This is a fun romp for anyone who did well in advanced algebra. (JAB)