"Here's Looking at Euclid"

[fiefoe]

The first quarter of Alex Bellos' book was rich in anecdotes.

• By age 16, schoolkids have learned almost no math beyond what was already known in the mid-seventeenth century.
• the Trans-Amazon Highway, a 1970s folly of nationalistic infrastructure
• When King David counted his own people he was punished with three days of pestilence and 77,000 deaths.
• The logarithmic scale is also faithful to the way distances are perceived, which is possibly why it is so intuitive. It takes account of perspective.
• Coco's mindless gaze, the nonchalant tapping of a flashing, beeping computer and the mundanity of continual reward reminded me of an old lady doing the slots.
• Some of the ants had the bottoms of their legs clipped off and other ants were given stilts made from pig bristles... the ones with longer legs overshot it, suggesting that instead of using their eyes, the ants judged distance with an internal pedometer.
• In several cultures the numerals for 1, 2 and 3 have been one, two and three lines, while the number for 4 is not four lines.
• Each neuron had a “preferred” number—a number that made it most active.
• The word “grocer,” in fact, is a relic of a retailer’s preference for 12—it comes from “gross,” meaning a dozen dozen, or 144.
• If I lent some money to the Bank of England I would be given a stock with a notch indicating the amount—which explains the origins of the words “stockholder”.. Obscure financial instruments have often had an impact on the work of government, but only the tally stick has brought down a parliament.
• Leibniz’s conviction that binary exemplified a fundamental metaphysical truth
• In the limit, the Menger sponge is an object with an infinitely large surface area that is also invisible.
• When Erik Demaine was 17 he and his collaborators proved that it is possible to create any shape with straight sides by folding a piece of paper and making just one cut.
• The circle, 0, was chosen because it portrays the cyclical movements of the face of heaven.
• Klein was already a veteran of circuses and music halls when, in 1958, he was given a job by Europe’s top physics institute—the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva—providing calculations for the physicists.
• With 39 decimal places, it is possible to compute the circumference of a circle surrounding the known universe to within an accuracy of a radius of a hydrogen atom.
• In the 1980s the Ukrainian-born mathematicians Gregory and David Chudnovsky devised an even more ferocious formula. Each new term adds roughly 15 digits.
• “You have to realize usually moviemakers repeat their internal state,” added David sarcastically.
• Peter Roget—whose compulsive list making (as a coping mechanism for mental illness) resulted in his Thesaurus—invented the log-log scale, which enabled calculation of fractions of powers, like 32.5, and square roots.