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Perfect Figures: The Lore of Numbers and How We Learned to Count - Hardcover

Crumpacker, Bunny

 
9780312360054: Perfect Figures: The Lore of Numbers and How We Learned to Count
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0312360053 ISBN 13: 9780312360054
Verlag: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Since the beginning of civilization, numbers have been more than just a way to keep count. Perfect Figures tells the stories of how each number came to be and what incredible associations and superstitions have been connected to them ever since. Along the way are some of the great oddities of numbers' past as:
-a time when finger-counting was a sign of intelligence (the Venerable Bede could count to a million on his hands)
-the medieval Algorists, who were burnt at the stake for their use of Arabic rather than Roman numerals
-the Bank of England, which stubbornly kept accounts on notched wooden sticks until 1826
Filled with Crumpacker’s eloquent wit and broad intelligence, Perfect Figures brings the history of numbers to life just as Bill Bryson did for the English language in The Mother Tongue.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

BUNNY CRUMPACKER is the author of The Sex Life of Food, as well as two books based on historic food and recipe pamphlets. Her book reviews appear in The Washington Post. She lives in Valley Cottage, New York.


BUNNY CRUMPACKER is the author of The Sex Life of Food, as well as two books based on historic food and recipe pamphlets. Her book reviews appear in The Washington Post. She lived in Valley Cottage, New York.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Perfect Figures
1
ONE IS ALL
One is the beginning, the single starting place. It's the universe at the big bang: There was that enormous event, that unthinkable noise, and suddenly, in a fraction of a second, whatever there was--had it been One?--had shattered. It became a billion million stars, galaxies after galaxies of stars, stars with planets and moons and meteors and asteroids, each one containing everything again, atoms and molecules, charm and quark, and each thing--each atom, each galaxy--was still one, one again. One after one to infinity.
At our own beginning, there were no numbers, not even one. We had no need for numbers--no need to count, no need to know how many. Sufficient unto itself, and for our survival, was each person, each thing, each moment.
Very unlike a divine man would he be, who is unable to count one, two, three, or to distinguish odd and even numbers. PLATO
We knew the day, and the darkness that came after the day, night after day and then day after night. But eventually the time must have come when someone wanted to keep track of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and count what fills those days: moons and meals and springtimes. And eventually, someone wanted to count what was his--animals, perhaps, or arrows, or seeds, oil, and grain. Perhaps someone wanted to know what was coming--how manydays it would be necessary to wait until the floods would come again, or the moon would disappear and then come back, how long before the baby would be born, or how long before the sun returned from its trip to the edge of the world and the cold passed and the days slowly began to grow longer again.
There is an unexpected story in the history of how we learned to count--from our first recognition of numero uno, the one we mean when we point to ourselves, to the vast numbers we think of when we look at the stars on a moonless night.
Counting is a natural process, almost inevitable, and numbers are organic. They begin with the single line of our bodies, the psychic feel of ourselves. They grow, one by one by one, but they always remain intimately connected to our physical being, from the twoness of our eyes and arms and legs to our ten fingers and--should we need them--our ten toes.
The concept of number is the obvious distinction between beast and man. Thanks to number, the cry becomes a song, noise acquires rhythm, the spring is transformed into a dance, force becomes dynamic, and outlines, figures.
JOSEPH DE MAISTRE
Counting is as natural as numbers. We count each other, and then our children, the things we own, the days we've passed through. Numbers count the things of the world, which must have become less untamable as we numbered its parts and learned to give them names. When we drew an animal on the wall of a cave, we made this one, and then that one--one and two--and we gave the animal its name. When we made designs of the stars over our heads and told their stories to each other, we remembered how many stars there are in Orion's belt or in Cassiopeia's chair. Everywhere, we learned numbers this naturally, and taught ourselves to count, because we always needed to know how many.
Once, we wanted to know how many cattle left in the morning and came home at night, how many seeds it was necessary to savefor next year's planting, or how many days there were from full moon to full moon. Now we need zip codes and Social Security numbers, phone numbers and license plates. Our passports and our houses are numbered, as are our charge accounts and checks and telephones. Numbers have grown away from the simplicity of you and me and the baby. Now, they define us with increasing complexity, and we lose track of how they began, one by one by one--this one, that one, those, and me, you, and the rest of the world.
In another way, perhaps God taught Adam to count when he crafted Eve from Adam's rib and suddenly, where there had been one, lo! there were two. Did Adam and Eve keep track of their children by counting? Did they subtract one from two when Abel disappeared and only Cain was left? Apparently not. But clearly, God could count.
Once we left the garden, learning to count for ourselves was a slow process--it took millennia to learn to answer, in all the varied ways, the basic questions of mathematics: how many? how much? Like magic, numbers became visible as we needed to know them. Along the way, people counted in different ways in different places--by twos, fours, fives, twelves, twenties, sixties, and finally, by tens. Everywhere, numbers became part of civilization, and then came to mean more than just the amount they stood for--they meant good luck and bad, wishes and fairy tales, religion and a way of forecasting the future.
Although we learned numbers at different times and places, we always began with one. Here, we used piles of pebbles as equivalents for numbers, and there, we made notches on sticks or bones, but everywhere, even today, men and women have used their fingers to count. We forget how organic numbers are--how they grew out of our bodies as we learned to hold one finger up to mean one, or point to our eyes for two, and to find higher numbers on our fingers and our toes.
It isn't necessary to count the way we do now in order to answerthe basic question of how many. Little children can say numbers from one to eleventy and beyond, but they have different ways of telling you how many toys they have--this one and that one and the other one, maybe, or just twenty-teen-two.
COUNTING WITHOUT NUMBERS
Do animals count the same way we do? No matter how well we think of ourselves, we aren't alone in grasping the concept of number. Even the lowly rat can learn to press a lever a specific number of times, or take the third right turn (not the second or fourth) in a maze that leads to a reward. Pigeons can learn to peck at a target a specific number of times--thirty-five, not forty, or twenty-three, not nineteen. Chimpanzees will choose a tray that holds seven chocolates over one that holds six. Clever Hans, the famous counting horse, used almost subliminal cues from his trainer and figured out from that--not from the number--how many times to stamp his hoof, but all these animals are, in some way, counting.
Recent research leads us to believe that counting may be simply hard-wired into our brains, whether we're pigeons or people. Monkeys in a study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology linked computer frames containing a number of dots to frames that were different but contained the same number of dots. Neurons in the monkeys' prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that makes rapid decisions) rewired themselves when the first frames were shown, and when the same numbers reappeared, the neurons were quickly reactivated--the monkeys recognized the number, even though the frames were different.
But how do cicadas keep track of the years they need underground? They rise through the green grass and into the trees once every seventeen years to make a new generation, and thenreturn through pale roots to the dark underground, to wait and count through all those slow winters before the precise springtime comes and they are ready to rise again, thousands of them all at once, to find their mates.
How do ants find their way home? Or, for that matter, how do they know the way to return to a food source, once they've found it? Researchers trained desert ants to travel from their nest to a food source, and then, to test whether the number of steps they had to take affected their ability to locate the food, glued stiltlike extensions to the legs of some ants and shortened (by cutting) the legs of others. The newly tall ants took the same number of steps they had already...

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Verlag
Thomas Dunne Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0312360053
ISBN 13 
9780312360054
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
271
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