22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gets off to a strong start, March 27, 2005
This review is from: The Book of Numbers (Hardcover)
Conway and Guy start this book with an enticing survey of how numbers pervade the English language, showing the hidden (or not-so-hidden) numerical roots of common words. They also mention other numbering systems, including the Roman numerals, Greek, Egyptian, and cuneiform Babylonian - numbers that persist in our 60-based measures of minutes and seconds, in both time and angle.
Next, they move into squares, triangular numbers, and many others with rich geometric meanings. Chapters 1 and 2, especially, create vivid images that bring many of their concepts to life. I had a bit of trouble finding ch.3's focus. It touches briefly combinatorics, a world in itself, and difference techniques. I found "Jackson's Fan" fascinating, but too terse for easy application to real problems. After this, the going gets a lot tougher, fast.
By ch 4, "Famous Families," the illustration is no longer as vivid as before. Ch. 6, on fractions and decimal expansions also held some interest - it touches on complexity in the decimal forms of fractions, and the numeric roots from which it springs. The section on continued fractions is only just enough to titillate without really enlightening. Discussion of imaginary numbers is OK, and offers some enjoyable insights. The section on quaternions, though, does a lot less to invite personal involvement and stir the imagination. Later sections of the book present readable surveys of their topics, but require a lot more form the reader in the way of determination and mathematical background.
If the whole book sustained the initial energy, it would have been an instant classic. The later parts of the book were clear, readable, and even enjoyable, but didn't match the breadth or vividness of the first half. I enjoyed this, but I may not come back to it.
//wiredweird
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, but not as good as ONAG or Winning Ways, November 17, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The Book of Numbers (Hardcover)
Conway wrote On Numbers and Games. Conway, Guy, and Berlekamp wrote Winning Ways. These groundbreaking books are now hard to find. I hope both will be reprinted soon. The Book of Numbers has a short section on Combinatorial Game Theory -- just a taste. I expected much more about CGT. Still, TBON is an excellent book about numbers. Many diagrams, a lot of top-notch mathematics, and excellent writing fills each chapter. I would recommend this book for any high school student, but it would be quite enjoyable for fans of math at any level.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Delightful!!!, September 8, 2000
This review is from: The Book of Numbers (Hardcover)
This is a delightful survey of numbers clearly aimed at as wide an audience as possible. However, as is always the case in such books the book is more formidable than it intends or than it looks. Still it is very friendly especially compared with, say, "Numbers" by Ebbinghays et al. The coverage is wide: primes, reals, Cayley numbers, Eisenstein numbers, polygonal numbers, catalan numbers, Stirling numbers of both types and of course Bell numbers. There are the cardinals and ordinals of Cantor as well as Conway's own surreal numbers. (And an earlier reviewer was correct about misprints and color problems.) I recommend this to anyone whose mathematical maturity is at least as great as basic calculus (and who is interested).
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