The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math

"Well, when I go around giving talks, people will say to me: I’m a math person, but there’s no book I can give to my parents. Some of the math books out there are difficult to read, but this isn’t one of them. It’s not trying to boggle your mind. It’s an elegant journey explaining why we have the number and math systems that we have. He walks you through the beginning of the invention of numbers. Everyone knows one, two, three, four. All cultures have this. But once you have these numbers, you can invent operations like addition and subtraction. Once these operations exist, you must create the concept of zero. It took some time to come up with the idea of zero because it’s very abstract, you can’t see it. You can only imagine zero. But once you have zero, it leads elsewhere. There’s this question: is math invented or discovered? I think from this book, you get that it is discovered. It’s natural that we are going to come up with this system; it’s like carbon or oxygen, waiting to be discovered, one of the periodic table of elements. For example, if you have zero, you then have negative numbers. Once you invent multiplication, division follows, and you naturally have fractions. Fractions are useful, and they can be ordered by size. Then he shows how these concepts lead to the idea of rational numbers, which are decimals that can be written in terms of fractions. These lead to the idea of irrational numbers like Pi that starts 3.141… and goes on forever without any numerical patterns. He says that the fact pi goes on forever is an important concept because it fits in between the fractions. If it were finite, you could write it as a fraction. But there’s an infinite number of these irrational numbers out there. He goes on to show how the idea of fractals came about. Next is the concept of algebra: how do you solve for unknowns? You don’t actually do any math in the book, he talks about what, chronologically, was next discovered, and the next step that makes sense. It took hundreds of years to make each discovery, but each step is logical. He’s basically explaining the mathematical ideas you use every day. It’s elegant, it’s beautiful, and the level is quite reasonable. Yes, and I think people appreciate it and take something away. Suri is a professor, and as someone from that community, I know have confused people and made people fall asleep. So how do you get people to understand, and make it engaging, and make it long enough to be a whole book? That’s the task. I think that science books have changed quite a bit. They are getting much more diverse, which is great, and they are attacking topics we haven’t seen before. For example, before Heartbreak , Florence Williams wrote a book about breasts that won a prize. Today, we’re getting different kinds of authors who are writing new kinds of books. The writing is also getting more personal than before. People are less afraid to talk about their vulnerabilities and their weaknesses, and that makes it more human. Tone-wise, they are less worried about sounding authoritative, and I think that’s great. There’s more humour, some of these books are downright funny. So I’m glad science books are going in this direction, and that they truly integrate the science. If you took the science out of them, they wouldn’t be so good."