Alex's Adventures In Numberland

What Hacker News says

1. Aerbil313Nov 2023
   There are arena in the brain which encode integers up to <small number I forgot>. Alex’s Adventures In Numberland was a fascinating book.
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2. chris_dcostaDec 2011
   Try a book Adventures in Numberland. It's not a mathematics manual, but written in plain language explaining pretty much everything to simpletons, like me. I'm not saying you're one, but the author is a mathematician, so you might get more out of it.

   Amazing stuff. I now understand much about the patterns in numbers that I had no idea even existed, and how they can be used to simplify complex concepts.

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3. Aerbil313May 2024
   Not completely. Can't find it now, but there was research cited in the book Alex's Adventures in Numberland showing a real statistical deviation, example: Lawrences' studying Law school more frequently.
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4. iainmerrickApr 2024
   It's a pretty common trope, especially for math-related books, e.g. Alex Bellos' "Alex's Adventures in Numberland".
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5. glenngillenJan 2020
   Definitely tangential to this discussion, but it's about language and sufficiently geeky I think the HN crowd would probably appreciate:

   I read a book a few years ago called Alex's Adventures in Numberland (https://www.amazon.com.au/Alexs-Adventures-Numberland-Alex-B...). In it he has a story about a group in South America who have no words in their language for a number greater than two (or maybe it was three? It's been a while since I read it). Anything larger than that was just referred to as "many". It's not as though seeing more than two of anything was uncommon, most families would have a half dozen to a dozen children. But if you asked how many children they had it was just "many". Whether it was eleven or twelve just wasn't an important distinction to them.

   He goes on to discuss how language can expose what's important to a group and shape thinking. The introduction of a concept and word for zero was hugely important for our advancement in all number of fields. He also discusses how our constant pursuit for ever increasing levels of specificity has it's trade-offs: we seem to be becoming increasingly bad at estimating (which is both language, social expectations around what we value, and a reliance on tools).

   Anyways, it was a story about language and numbers that I thoroughly enjoyed.

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6. ColinWrightMay 2012
   Related: Logicomix

   http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3991687

   http://www.logicomix.com/en/

   Mentioned in glowing terms here on HN many times:

   http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=logicomix

   http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846451

   http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870762

   http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=874471

   http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3690254

   It was my present for proofing an early draft of "Here's Looking at Euclid" / "Alex's Adventures in Numberland"

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