Trade Paperback
Counting: Humans, History and the Infinite Lives of Numbers
By Benjamin Wardhaugh
What has counting meant to different cultures and different individuals?
In this book, historian and mathematician Benjamin Wardhaugh explores stories from all over the world and from every period of human history, from the African Stone Age to cyberspace; from Assyrian kings to Chinese peasants.
Weaving these histories together, Wardhaugh shows the ways in which counting has been continually reinvented over time, through language, writing, counters and machines. He illustrates how counting has shaped culture, and culture has shaped counting, in a vast story as wide, deep, and tangled as the story of human culture: the story of human attempts to find some order in an unruly world; or, perhaps, to impose on a reluctant world the order that humans find within themselves.
‘An astonishingly readable and informative history of the greatest mathematical bestseller of all time, from ancient Greece to dark energy. The writing is vivid and the stories are gripping. Highly recommended!’Ian Stewart, author of Significant Figures -
‘Benjamin Wardhaugh is an excellent storyteller and his collected short story approach to the history of The Elements works splendidly… simultaneously educational, entertaining and illuminating … A highly desirable read for all those, both professional and amateur, who interest themselves in the histories of mathematics, science and knowledge … over almost two and a half millennia’Thony Christie, The Renaissance Mathematicus -
Praise for Benjamin Wardhaugh’s Gunpowder and Geometry -
”'Meticulous yet lively biography, even those who have never heard of its subject could hardly disagree” - Sunday Times
”'Wardhaugh graphically describes the conditions Hutton escaped from and the importance of Newcastle and its coal to the changes taking place in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century . . . like something from the pages of a Jane Austen novel . . . Wardhaugh has done a good job of rescuing Hutton from obscurity and setting the man and his achievements in the context of their times . . . This account of how 'the pit boy turned professor' became 'one of the most revered British scientists of his day' is well worth reading” - Literary Review
”'As this book argues persuasively, he changed a whole culture: by simple dint of his genial celebrity as well as a europhile passion for developments in France and elsewhere, he helped to elevate mathematics to a rank equal with the other sciences. It is impossible not to warm to such a man in Wardhaugh’s wryly sympathetic telling . . . Spirited and elegantly erudite” - Daily Telegraph