after alex bellos · alex's adventures in numberland
Numberland
Six short adventures in the lovely bits of mathematics — the strange history of zero, the endless digits of π, the hotel with infinitely many rooms, the day Euclid's world cracked open, a sunflower that counts in Fibonacci, and the sieve that finds the atoms of arithmetic.
Chapter I
Zero
The number that is not there.
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Chapter II
Pi
The number that never ends.
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Chapter III
Infinity
The end of the line.
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Chapter IV
The Fifth Postulate
The day the parallel lines met.
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Chapter V
Fibonacci
Nature’s favourite number.
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Chapter VI
Primes
The atoms of arithmetic.
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the book
A field guide to wonder
Alex Bellos' 2010 book — Alex's Adventures in Numberland in the UK, Here's Looking at Euclid in the US — is a travelogue of mathematics: how humans counted, where zero came from, why π refuses to end, and what happens when geometry grows up. These six chapters adapt a few of its themes into small, quiet animations — an invitation to watch a piece of maths think.