One to Nine: 12/10/10

I remember hearing about One to Nine: The Inner Life of Numbers by Andrew Hodges. I want to say I heard it on KQED, my local public radio station but I'm having trouble verifying my memory. I know it was an extended review that I heard somewhere was the reason behind me adding it to my wishlist. As I am married to a math professor and have a calculus teacher mother in law and, frankly, like math, I had to read the book.

The book has a chapter devoted to a different number, the first nine natural numbers. So chapter one tries to cover everything numerically interesting about one. Then the book repeats the process with two, three, and so forth, all the way through nine.

I hoped I might pick up something new, a numeric tidbit I didn't know. Or maybe I'd learn a little history about the numbers. What I got instead was an encyclopedia of numerology presented as prose. It was dense, disjointed reading.

What I also discovered is that at least for a layman's book on numbers, I had heard of nearly everything presented in the book. So it wasn't the new and exciting look at numbers I was hoping for. That said, it is still a great reference on things one to nine.

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