The author of Alex's Adventures in Numberland returns with a dazzling new book that turns even the most complex math into a brilliantly entertaining narrative.
From triangles, rotations and power laws, to fractals, cones and curves, bestselling author Alex Bellos takes you on a journey of mathematical discovery with his signature wit, engaging stories and limitless enthusiasm. As he narrates a series of eye-opening encounters with lively personalities all over the world, Alex demonstrates how numbers have come to be our friends, are fascinating and extremely accessible, and how they have changed our world.
He turns even the dreaded calculus into an easy-to-grasp mathematical exposition, and sifts through over 30,000 survey submissions to reveal the world's favourite number. In Germany, he meets the engineer who designed the first roller-coaster loop, whilst in India he joins the world's highly numerate community at the International Congress of Mathematicians. He explores the wonders behind the Game of Life program, and explains mathematical logic, growth and negative numbers. Stateside, he hangs out with a private detective in Oregon and meets the mathematician who looks for universes from his garage in Illinois.
Read this captivating book, and you won't realise that you're learning about complex concepts. Alex will get you hooked on maths as he delves deep into humankind's turbulent relationship with numbers, and proves just how much fun we can have with them. "Bellos, a natural storyteller, moves smoothly from simple topics to those more complex... [He] deftly shows readers why math is so important, and why it can be so much fun."
-Publishers Weekly
"British math geek Alex Bellos regales readers with dozens of nutty but true stories... The amiable Bellos is a people person at heart, one who has compassion for those of us who feel a bit uncomfortable around a whole lot of numbers."
-The Boston Globe
"A readable, fascinating exploration of some higher math... There is a lot of cool stuff for the math-curious in here (Benford's Law, Conway's Game of Life, how to fairly divide a cake between three people) presented in a lively manner not seen in the old math textbooks."
-Mother Jones
"I highly recommend checking out Bellos' new book, The Grapes of Math."
-iO9 ALEX BELLOS is an author, print journalist and broadcaster who specializes in maths, science and South America. His previous books are both bestsellers: Alex's Adventures in Numberland, about math, and Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, about Brazil seen through the lens of soccer. Bellos also ghost-wrote the autobiography of Pelé. The author lives in London, UK and Rio de Janeiro.
