Alex Bellos - Alexs Adventures in Numberland

In which the author tries to find out where numbers come from, since they havent been around that long. He meets a man who has lived in the jungle and a chimpanzee who has always lived in the city.

In which the author learns about the tyranny of ten, and the revolutionaries plotting its downfall. He goes to an after-school club in Tokyo, where the pupils learn to calculate by thinking about beads.

In which the author almost changes his name because the disciple of a Greek cult leader says he must. Instead, he follows the instructions of another Greek thinker, dusts off his compass and folds two business cards into a tetrahedron.

In which the author travels to India for an audience with a Hindu seer. He discovers some very slow methods of arithmetic and some very fast ones.

In which the author is in Germany to witness the worlds fastest mental multiplication. It is a roundabout way to begin telling the story of circles, a transcendental tale that leads him to New York and a new appreciation of the 50p piece.

In which the author explains why numbers are good but letters are better. He visits a man in Braintree who collects slide-rules and hears the tragic tale of their demise. Includes an exposition of logarithms, a dictionary of calculator words and how to make a superegg.

In which the author is on a mathematical puzzle quest. He investigates the legacy of two Chinese men one was a dim-witted recluse and the other fell off the Earth and then flies to Oklahoma to meet a magician.

In which the author is first confronted with the infinite. He encounters an unstoppable snail and a devilish family of numbers.

In which the author meets a Londoner with a claw who claims to have discovered the secret of beautiful teeth.

In which the author remembers the dukes of hasard and goes gambling in Reno. He takes a walk through randomness and ends up in an office block in Newport Beach, California where, if he looked across the ocean, he might be able to spot a lottery winner on a desert island in the South Pacific.

In which the authors farinaceous overindulgence is an attempt to savour the birth of statistics.

In which the author terminates his journey with crisps and crochet. Hes looking at Euclid, again, and then at a hotel with an infinite number of rooms that cannot cope with a sudden influx of guests.

In the summer of 1992 I was working as a cub reporter at the Evening Argus in Brighton. My days were spent watching recidivist teenagers appear at the local magistrates court, interviewing shopkeepers about the recession and, twice a week, updating the opening hours of the Bluebell Railway for the papers listings page. It wasnt a great time if you were a petty thief, or a shopkeeper, but for me it was a happy period in my life.

John Major had recently been re-elected as prime minister and, flush from victory, he delivered one of his most remembered (and ridiculed) policy initiatives. With presidential seriousness, he announced the creation of a telephone hotline for information about traffic cones a banal proposal dressed up as if the future of the world depended on it.

In Brighton, however, cones were big news. You couldnt drive into town without getting stuck in roadworksThe main route from London the A23 (M) was a corridor of striped orange cones all the way from Crawley to Preston Park. With its tongue firmly in its cheek, the Argus challenged its readers to guess the number of cones that lined the many miles of the A23 (M). Senior staff congratulated themselves on such a brilliant idea. The village fte-style challenge explained the story while also poking fun at central government: perfect local-paper stuff.

Yet only a few hours after the competition was launched, the first entry was received, and in it the reader had guessed the correct number of cones. I remember the senior editors sitting in dejected silence in the newsroom, as if an important local councillor had just died. They had aimed to parody the prime minister, but it was they who had been made to look like fools.

The editors had assumed that guessing how many cones there were on 20 or so miles of motorway was an impossible task. It self-evidently wasnt and I think I was the only person in the building who could see why. Assuming that cones are positioned at identical intervals, all you need to do is make one calculation:

Number of cones = length of road distance between cones

The length of road can be measured by driving down it or by reading a map. To calculate the distance between cones you just need a tape measure. Even though the space between cones may vary a little, and the estimated length of road may also be subject to error, over large distances the accuracy of this calculation is good enough for the purposes of winning competitions in local papers (and was presumably exactly how the traffic police had counted the cones in the first place when they supplied the Argus with the right answer).

I remember this incident very clearly because it was the first moment in my career as a journalist that I realized the value of having a mathematical mind. It was also disquieting to realize just how innumerate most journalists are. There was nothing very complicated about finding out how many cones were lined alongside a road, yet for my colleagues the calculation was a step too far.

Two years previously I had graduated in mathematics and philosophy, a degree with one foot in science and the other in the liberal arts. Entering journalism was a decision, at least superficially, to abandon the former and embrace the latter. I left the Argus shortly after the cones fiasco, moving to work on papers in London. Eventually, I became a foreign correspondent in Rio de Janeiro. Occasionally my heightened aptitude for numbers was helpful, such as when finding the European country whose area was closest to the most recently deforested swathe of Amazon jungle, or when calculating exchange rates during various currency crises. But essentially, it felt very much as if I had left maths behind.