The Grapes of Math: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life by Alex Bellos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s Never Too Late For A Happy Childhood

In my youth Ripley’s Believe It or Not was a monthly (or was it weekly?) publication in comic book format. It was fascinating to a child because it ‘documented’ all sorts of strange events, people, and conditions that were apparently unknown to adults - two-headed snakes, ghostly apparitions, unlikely survivals, and past-life memories were standard fare. It was instructive, if in no other sense than to provoke an attempt to verify the most outlandish of its claims. In addition, one could feel somehow superior to one’s ignorant elders who were entirely unaware of the essentially magical character of the world.

The Grapes of Math is a sort of Ripley’s Believe It or Not of mathematics; it appeals to that same childish sense of the strange, the bizarre, and the occult. To discover, for example, that it is Shakespeare who is responsible for the transformation of the word ‘odd’ from denoting uneven numbers to suggesting strangeness of people or situations is just the sort of revelation I mean. Or that digits always appear in a frequency specified by Benford’s law regardless of their sources in daily newspapers, census reports, or stock market data - and no one understands why!

These and dozens of others are factoids which the young adolescent mind finds fascinating. They also constitute an enjoyable introduction to the otherwise abstruse and often rather intimidating topics of number theory, algebraic geometry, and infinitesimal calculus, among many others. I’m not sure that Alex Bellos’s breezy survey will appeal to all those young folk who find maths difficult but it certainly does much to bridge the arts/science divide. And if you’re a bit older, the book might even provide some fodder to fill the odd gaps in cocktail party chat.

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