Popular Science Children's Review - Numbers: The Key to the Universe

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Review - Numbers: The Key to the Universe - Kjartan Poskitt

There's an effect most of us who know people with newborn babies have come across. They will show you a picture of a little, wrinkled prune-like thing and say "isn't he gorgeous, he's just so perfect," or words to that effect. The fact is, only his parents could think so. And something very similar happens with mathematicians and numbers. There's an awful lot of them out there that only a mathematician could get excited about. Sadly, that includes a fair number (!) Kjartan Poskitt has included in the latest entry in the Murderous Maths sequence.

There's fun stuff in there too - Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio, primes, the briefest of glimpses of infinity - but there's an awful lot that just goes on and on (and on). Even the little stories fail to liven up some of this numerical manipulation. And there are just too many tricks with numbers: "isn't it amazing - add this to that, take this away, stand on your head and when you look at, it's the number you first thought of." Or at least that kind of thing. It's not that maths is boring, or even that it's a problem that much of this is useless (something Poskitt makes a big thing of), but rather that there's lots more interesting stuff out there.

For instance he has a fleeting couple of pages on imaginary numbers. Much more could have been done with these, rather than those endless numerical manipulations.

So there's good stuff in there, it's just there's a fair amount of mediocre too. Still, it should make very effective bedtime reading.

Only in paperback.

Reviewed by Peter Spitz

* Our age range recommendation is an estimated guide, but individual readers outside the range could still enjoy the book!

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