15 March 2002

Go here. Watch. Laugh. Watch the other cartoons at the same site at your own peril, though.

Yesterday I started reading a new book, Georges Ifrah's The Universal History of Numbers. I'm still reading the forward and I'm hooked.

Ifrah was a schoolteacher in France, and one day his students hit him with a barrage of questions about numbers. Where did numbers come from? Who invented them? Why are there different numbering systems? Why do people think there are lucky and unlucky numbers?

Like a good teacher, he tried to find the answers for his students, but mathematics books do not, as a rule, address history. Or if they do, they're central to the culture for which they're written, and talk about famous mathematicians and their discoveries. They don't talk about the origin of the field. And while there are countless history books, most of them don't talk about anything as conceptually simple as numbers.

The questions haunted him, so - long after his students had completely forgotten them, I'm sure - Ifrah quit his job as a teacher and went on what he describes as his own personal quest for the Holy Grail. He worked odd jobs and travelled all over the world, visiting libraries and museums and corresponding with specialists in a wide variety of fields.

What he ended up with were two books - this one, and The Universal History of Computing, which I may well buy as soon as I'm done with this - which trace the history of numbers and computational devices as far back as he could stretch, over the whole world. Numbers is not a thin book - over 650 pages.

Yeah, I'm a little excited about this book. I know, I know - I'm an enormous geek. But then, I'm pretty sure we all already knew that.

--Liz