The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers

David Wells

sept 1997 · Penguin UK

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Why was the number of Hardy's taxi significant? Why does Graham's number need its own notation? How many grains of sand would fill the universe? What is the connection between the Golden Ratio and sunflowers? Why is 999 more than a distress call? All these questions and a host more are answered in this fascinating book, which has now been newly revised, with nearly 200 extra entries and some 250 additions to the original entries. From minus one and its square root, via cyclic, weird, amicable, perfect, untouchable and lucky numbers, aliquot sequences, the Cattle problem, Pascal's triangle and the Syracuse algorithm, music, magic and maps, pancakes, polyhedra and palindromes, to numbers so large that they boggle the imagination, all you ever wanted to know about numbers is here. There is even a comprehensive index for those annoying occasions when you remember the name but can't recall the number.

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DAVID WELLS has written extensively on problems and popular mathematics, and many of his titles are available in Penguin. He is involved in education through writing and research, and lives in this country.