Playing with Infinity

"This book was recommended to me by my inspirational maths teacher at senior school, Mr Bellis, soon after I met calculus for the first time. And I still remember very well the moving dedication at the front of the book: ‘To my brother, Dr Nicolas Politzer, who perished at Colditz in Saxony, 1945’. The author, Rozsa Peter, was a distinguished Hungarian pure mathematician, and she included some fairly advanced ideas, including, for instance, the way in which imaginary numbers can help us understand infinite series. Nonetheless, she was writing for the general public. In this way, then, I was introduced quite early to the whole idea of how serious mathematics – as opposed to ‘numeracy’ – might, in principle, be brought successfully to a wide readership."