The Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Numbers: Revised Edition (Penguin Press Science)
 

The Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Numbers: Revised Edition (Penguin Press Science S.)

by David Wells

Revised with nearly 200 new entries, this dictionary contains all the information that anyone ever wanted to know about numbers--from minus one and its square root to cyclic, weird, perfect, untouchable and lucky numbers to Pascal's triangle and the Syracuse algorithm to numbers so large they boggle the imagination. (read review)

Top tags: mathematics (all tags)

 

Member Reviews

  • bfeld
    • Rated 5 stars

    Curious and Interesting Numbers was also fantastic. It starts with -1 and i, patiently takes us through 117 pages before breaking the number 100, and then accelerates into some really interesting numbers. We end with 1^billion (a “gigaplex”), F23471 (the largest known composite Fermat number), 10^10^10^34 (Skews’ number – that was a new one to me) and then Graham’s number (the world champion largest number.) After reading it, 3, 9, 27, and 42 are still my favorite numbers.

    bfeld wrote this review Saturday, March 31 2007. ( reply | permalink )
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