Wonders of Numbers: Adventures in Math, Mind, and Meaning by Clifford
Pickover, Oxford University Press, $25, ISBN 0195133420
HOW do you entertain yourself on a slow weekend afternoon? Watch golf on TV,
or try to figure out the 100-billionth digit of &pgr;? If the second option appeals,
then Clifford Pickover鈥檚 new book is for you.
You don鈥檛 have to be a professional mathematician to be a fan of numbers and
subjectively constructed lists. As Pickover points out, amateurs still make a
big contribution to the area of numerical ephemera. Nearly all the items in
Wonders of Numbers can be appreciated with little or no background in
mathematics, and many of them are in the form of challenging puzzles.
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Yet this book has its frustrating aspects for all comers, not least its lack
of any structure other than the enthusiasm of the author. And there are errors.
One of the 125 short essays (鈥淶oologic鈥�) asks you to find the shortest route
through a geometric configuration of dots and lines known to mathematicians as a
graph, and the solution Pickover gives is wrong in two ways. More importantly,
the follow-up sections fail to show readers where they might go to learn more
about this kind of problem. And he doesn鈥檛 even hint that there is a theory of
related problems (as there is).
Yet despite such flaws, any open-minded person will still find something
thought-provoking and amazing here.