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Sunday, January 16, 2011

The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers (Kindle Ebook)

I'm not a big television person, but one of my favorite shows is Numbers. I love the idea of math being used to solve problems. If you also enjoy math and numbers, you may want to download this nicely geeky read for your kindle: The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers

Why was the number of Hardy's taxi significant? Why does Graham's number need its own notation? How many grains of sand would fill the universe? What is the connection between the Golden Ratio and sunflowers? Why is 999 more than a distress call? All these questions and a host more are answered in this fascinating book, which has now been newly revised, with nearly 200 extra entries and some 250 additions to the original entries. From minus one and its square root, via cyclic, weird, amicable, perfect, untouchable and lucky numbers, aliquot sequences, the Cattle problem, Pascal's triangle and the Syracuse algorithm, music, magic and maps, pancakes, polyhedra and palindromes, to numbers so large that they boggle the imagination, all you ever wanted to know about numbers is here. There is even a comprehensive index for those annoying occasions when you remember the name but can't recall the number.


It's just shy of $10 in the Kindle store, and the reviews are positive. As one person says, "No recreational mathematician should be without it."

The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers

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