Thinking in Numbers

Starred review from April 29, 2013
An autistic savant shares his insights on mathematics and life in this far-ranging collection of entertaining and thoughtful essays. Tammet’s (Born on a Blue Day) interests are intriguing and stunning in their diversity—one moment he’s considering the existence of extraterrestrial life and breaking down astronomer Frank Drake’s famous equation for calculating the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe; the next, he’s exploring Shakespeare’s fascination with “the presence of absence” and the ways in which nothing can reveal far more than something. The essay “Snowman,” one of the book’s best, is a poetic meditation on snowflakes and what they reveal about complexity. Tammet is a master of gleaning profound insights from seemingly mundane trivia, whether he’s considering the polydactylism of Anne Boleyn, the numberless Kpelle tribe of Liberia, Plato’s insistence that the ideal city be limited to exactly 5040 landholding families, or the mathematics of mortality rates. This is a delightful book, well-suited to random sampling, and capable of bringing even the most numerophobic readers into agreement with Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos: “I know numbers are beautiful. If they are not beautiful, nothing is.” Tammet’s paean to numbers is proof that Erdos was right. Agent: Andrew Lownie, Andrew Lownie Literary Agency (U.K.).

Starred review from June 15, 2013
A mathematical savant finds the beauty of numbers in unexpected places. Tammet (Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind, 2009, etc.), a man in love with numbers, reveals more about the mysteries of his mind in this delightful, diverse collection of essays. His topics include the concept of zero, the calendar, prime numbers, chess, time and statistics, but happily, readers need have no previous mathematical skills or knowledge. Several of his pieces have an autobiographical component. His essay on infinity shows him as a young boy discovering the infinity of fractions between two points on his walk home from school, and readers learn of his amazing memory in his account of reciting aloud the decimals of pi to 22,514 places at the University of Oxford's Pi Day. His insights are startling: Tammet sees connections between time tables and proverbs, between prime numbers and haiku, and between rhetoric and math. Trivia fans will find memorable items: His discussion of counting among different cultures reveals that in Icelandic, the word for "four" differs depending on whether one is counting sheep, buses or birthdays, and there is even one astronomer's formula for calculating the number of planets in the galaxy with communicative life. Far from didactic in tone, Tammet fills his essays with stories of real people, from Omar Khayyam to Stephen Jay Gould, from Archimedes and Pythagoras to Tolstoy and Shakespeare, and from Einstein to the author's own mother. The author's fascination with numbers takes him on a wide-ranging tour of history, literature and science, and readers who choose to join him are in for a mind-expanding trip. Great fun and the perfect gift for any math-phobic person, young or old.

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August 1, 2013

Autistic savant Daniel Tammet (Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant) talks numbers, and he does so with evident inspiration and awe. Whether or not readers consider themselves mathematically inclined, they will be enthralled. In somewhat autobiographical essays that are conversational in tone Tammet examines topics as disparate as the complexity of snowflakes, the nuances of counting in Icelandic, how big is big, and how Ann Boleyn leaned to count on her eleven fingers. He regales us with discussions that incorporate references to ancient societies, insights into modern usage of language, and sprinkle in the ideas of a wide range of scientists, mathematicians, poets, and novelists. His narration about the time he enumerated the number pi to over 22,000 decimal places is riveting. Tammet enlivens his discussion of numbers with engaging personal components, including a chapter about his mother, an approach that renders his book a delightful read for a broad audience. VERDICT This book will charm just about anyone, but will absolutely captivate sci-tech readers with an interest in mathematics.--Margaret F. Dominy, Drexel Univ. Lib., Philadelphia

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2013
With these words from a fellow mathematician, There is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics, Tammet describes the magical realms he explores in these 25 wonderful essays. Here numbers become portals to pure possibilities in the math of life. Smashing preconceptions of mathematics as a task for drudges, Tammet takes prime numbers as a key for unlocking haiku by Basho and shares the emotion-laden colors surging through his mind when, as a number artist, he sets a European record by reciting the value of pi to 22,514 decimal places. Tammet visits the pure possibilities in mathematics that inspire poetry, drama, and even theology. But the tether of impure reality tugs the author back into a world where impoverished grandparents suffer the indignity of eviction, their furniture scattered across the front lawn; a world where his mother manages Christmas for a large family only by scouring neighborhood garage sales. But then, perhaps, it is precisely in the tension between math's sublime dreamscapes and the terrestrial numbers of working-class budgets that readers truly see the math of life. Admirers of Tammet's Born on a Blue Day (2007) and Embracing the Wide Sky (2009) will find here fresh reasons to laud the author's gifts.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)