Alex Through The Looking Glass

Product Description

From triangles, rotations & power laws, to fractals, cones & curves, bestselling author Alex Bellos takes you on a journey of mathematical discovery with his signature wit, engaging stories & 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 & extremely accessible, & how they have changed our world. He turns even the dreaded calculus into an easy-to-grasp mathematical exposition, & 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, & explains mathematical logic, growth & negative numbers. Stateside, he hangs out with a private detective in Oregon & meets the mathematician who looks for universes from his garage in Illinois. Read this captivating book, & 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, & proves just how much fun we can have with them.