Customer Reviews

Perfect Figures: The Lore of Numbers and How We Learned to Count

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Perfect Figures by Bunny Crumpacker is a fantastic book that should be getting far more attention than it is. I've always wondered why numbers are written the way they are and how they evolved from thought to drawn figure to abstraction. Crumpacker writes with a delightful sense of humor making what could have been a dry dissertation-style book into an informative, funny, quirky read. Every other chapter I was bouncing up to tell my husband something new that amazed me. Wonder why a 2 looks like it does? It was originally two horizontal lines, when the writer got lazy and didn't lift up the pencil between the two, it turned into a z-like figure that became our two. Want to know what the number three has to do with a witness? The Latin word test-es means the third party to something between two other people and is related to the word tris-tes. That's where we get testimony, protest, contest, and testament, all from a third person witnessing what happens between another two. Crumpacker regularly uses humor to keep the book moving. In a description of many of the reverential views of the number three, she lists the three times chess was played on the original TV series Star Trek. Rarely has a book taught me so much and made it so enjoyable.