Alexander Bellos (born 1969) [1] is a British writer, broadcaster and mathematics communicator. [3] [4] [5] [6] He is the author of books about Brazil and mathematics, as well as having a column in The Guardian newspaper. [2] [7] Education and early life [ edit ] Shortlisted for National Sporting Club British Sports Book Awards Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life [ citation needed] Bellos, Alex (2012). "Alex Bellos: Writing about numbers". numberphile.com. Brady Haran. Archived from the original on 16 May 2013 . Retrieved 1 April 2013. Bellos is a former Guardian reporter who studied math and philosophy at Oxford University. He is pictured above among the main promoters of Vedic mathematics at the Shankaracharya of Puri’s temple in Puri, Orissa, India. This is an excellently researched and well-written book. It distinguishes itself from the body of popular science books by interspersing and motivating the mathematics it contains using stories, interviews and conversations with a variety of people, ranging from mathematicians and linguists to mystics. The result is a mixture of journalism, travel literature and mathematical history that will have a much wider appeal than many other accessible texts on mathematics.

Alex Bellos is witty, serious, engaging and if I may say so, utterly charming in his narration of the history of mathematics. He has organized the book in the way that allows him to be chronological while also taking diversions from time to time to connect with what's happening now in the field of mathematics.Several translations of the book have been published. The Italian version, Il meraviglioso mondo dei numeri, won both the €10,000 Galileo Prize for science books [14] [15] [16] and the 2011 Peano Prize [17] for mathematics books. In the United States, the book was given the title Here's Looking at Euclid. [18]

Alex Bellos is a gifted writer who has embarked on a mission to popularize mathematics. He makes a frank observation that should give pause to any reader: “By age 16, schoolkids have learned almost no math beyond what was already known in the mid-seventeenth century, and likewise by the time they are 18, they have not gone beyond the mid-eighteenth century.” What ensues is both a historical tour and spontaneous encounters with some of the most eccentric people currently operating on the fringes of mathematics. You must, must, must read this book. See the excerpts to know why (excerpts annotated with a lot of love)Mathematicians have explored ever more abstract worlds and geometries, floating in dimensions that may or may not exist and finding symmetries and patterns in hard-to-imagine shapes. They have studied the properties and patterns in numbers, straight lines, curves, surfaces, cubes and hypercubes, all in a bid to understand how these things fit together and what those details might reveal about the deeper logic of mathematics. Second, I would show you that there is beauty and joy in incredibly simple math. We don’t need to go to the high slopes–the foothills contain many treasures. Even something as well-known as the Pythagorean Theorem reveals wonderful patterns. Et Dieu Crea le Foot', National Geographic Channel". Archived from the original on 6 September 2010 . Retrieved 11 April 2012. On this journey, he makes some astonishing revelations and keeps you thoroughly entertained. I'm an engineer, so I might be slightly better positioned to understand this text, but the format and language of the book assumes nothing of the reader (without being condescending) and explains every concept in a way that even a lay person will be able to follow. The subject areas I discuss include the cognitive psychology of numbers, number systems, number bases, the abacus, Euclidean geometry, origami, arithmetic, pi, algebra, logarithms, slide rules, sequences, prime numbers, puzzles, magic squares, probability, statistics, non-Euclidean geometry and infinity