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In our hyper-modern world, we are bombarded with more facts, stats and information than ever before. So, what can we grasp hold of to make sense of it all? Oliver Johnson reveals how mathematical thinking can help us understand the myriad data all around us.
Picture yourself at a starting point before anything exists – no matter, no cosmos, not even empty space. Your task is to create the universe, but all you have to work with is, quite literally, ‘nothing’. How do you proceed? This is the thought experiment ‘The Big Bang of Numbers’ invites you into, as an original and completely accessible way to appreciate mathematics.
Even if you stick to the whole numbers, there are a lot to choose from – an infinite number in fact. Throw in decimal fractions and infinity suddenly gets an awful lot bigger (is that even possible?) And then there are the negative numbers, the imaginary numbers, the irrational numbers like pi which never end. It literally never ends. The world of numbers is indeed strange and beautiful. Among its inhabitants are some really notable characters – pi, e, the ‘imaginary’ number i and the famous golden ratio to name just a few. Prime numbers occupy a special status. Zero is very odd indeed: is it a number, or isn’t it? This book takes a tour of this mind-blowing but beautiful realm of numbers and the mathematical rules that connect them.
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