A frank acknowledgment that “anything I wrote was bound to resemble” Constance Reid's seminal From Zero to Infinity
doesn't stop mathematician and biographer Hodges (Alan Turing: The Enigma
) from boldly launching into his own rather disjointed explanation of the place of the numbers one through nine in mathematics and (primarily Western) culture. Pop culture references and political topics such as global warming, presumably meant to make terms like “quantum of existence” a little less scary to the novice, appear alongside subjects of more interest to math nerds (the author debunks the common assumption that mathematicians are male, overweight and perennially single). Some knowledge of mathematical vocabulary and history is necessary to fully appreciate Hodges's merry skipping from one subject to another—a single page mentions “Vonnegut's fiction... Plato's aesthetics, Euclid's pentagons, Fibonacci's rabbits [and] the inspiration of Islamic art and its parallels in Kepler”—but even the most halfhearted former math major will find a lot of familiar topics, like Schrödinger's cat and the equivalence of 1 with 0.99999.... The result is not entirely satisfying to either numerophobes or numerophiles. 40 illus. (May)
