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Product Details
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; Reprint edition (July 30, 2013)
I generally enjoy books about numbers and mathematics that are intended for a general reader. This one, I'm sorry to say, was an exception. It consists of independent essays that mix a great deal of personal musings, some history, and occasional interesting facts, but they never cohere into anything larger. Individual essays seem like mere wanderings, and so does the book as a whole.
A few are interesting: An account of how he set the world record for memorizing and reciting pi (to 22,514 decimal places) held my attention, but I wished he would offer better insight on why he chose to do this. Most of the time, after finishing an essay I wondered, "What was the point?"
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When it comes to math and numbers, generally speaking, I am not a fan. I'm a word girl. And yet, in THINKING IN NUMBERS, Daniel Tammet has found a way to help me appreciate the complexity, the magic and, yes, even the beauty he sees in numbers. Early on in this book of essays, Tammet put math into terms I could understand.
"Like works of literature," he wrote on page 10, "mathematical ideas help expand our circle of empathy, liberating us from the tyranny of a single, parochial point of view. Numbers, properly considered, make us better people." While I wasn't quite yet sold that numbers make us better people, I was intrigued by the analogy and compelled to keep reading.
Tammet is an autistic savant (one who broke the world record for reciting from memory more than 22,500 digits of Pi), and some of his essays are pretty heady. I'll admit, he lost me in a few of them, and I was forced to skim. My brain simply could not wrap around some of his ideas. As a person inspired by words and art, I was most drawn to his essays that related math to those elements.
In "Book of Books," Tammet examines the process of novel writing and the infinite possibilities and configurations the author must consider, much like a mathematical equation. And he introduced me to a novel by Julio Cortazar, titled Hopscotch, with a unique structure that enables readers make their own sense of the story. One can read the chapters consecutively from beginning to end, or in reverse order. One can read only the even numbered chapters, or only the prime numbered ones. And each reader will experience a different story. Wow. As a writer, and as a reader, this mathematical concept of a novel structure blew my mind.
Many of Tammet's essays were thought provoking, some were whimsical.Read more ›
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Read a couple of chapters and was bored beyond belief. I suppose if your mind does not work like the author's it's hard to grasp or care about what he wrote. Can't decide if he has a talent or a dilemma. I just know that his rambling about numbers seemed to me, merely rambling. But then, I'm not a scholar or a psychologist. Maybe it was just a bad purchase on my part. ??? Mathematicians might indeed find it great fun.
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As at least one other reviewer has pointed out, this book is not as memorable as BORN ON A BLUE DAY. The quote that has stood out for me was the opening sentence of Chapter 20--"Not long ago my mother's age reached double mine." It is Daniel's age that is doing the reaching, having reached one thousandths of his mother's age sometime in his first year of life. One day in September 1976 my oldest daughter reached the age of 26 months on the same day that her mother reached 26 years of age. This is the type of numerical apophenia that numbers and thinking in numbers occurs in my own life. Paul Erdos, the Hungarian mathematician thought numbers were beautiful and died on one of my friend's 35th birthday.I won't forget my own 35th birthday or what I did to honor a friend on her 35th birthday. And there is the commonality between the number of hours in a week and the number of fatalities in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Yes, Daniel thinks in numbers, but not quite in the same way as I do. There is enough meat to get through one reading of this book, but I think few will reread it again and again.
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This item: Thinking In Numbers: On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math
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