9/11/2023 0 Comments Evan schwartz numbers![]() ![]() Just read as far as it makes sense and then save the parts you don’t understand for later.” This book isn’t something that you have to read all at once, or even all in one year. If you fall off without finishing the whole book, don’t worry. The game is to stay on for as long as you can. The ride starts out slow and gets faster. ![]() “Before we get to the numbers, I want to tell you something about this book: It is like the game of bucking bronco I used to play with my daughters. Schwartz recognizes the fact that not everyone will be able to understand his book the first time through. ![]() I hope others are just as stumped as I was on some of the questions in the text. Although it is written for children, I found it enjoyable, and I think many other adults will too. The book is cheerfully illustrated and includes interesting factoids to help us get an intuitive feel for large quantities, from how many grains of sand you could fit into a basketball (a lot) to how many ways there are to visit the capitals of the lower 48 states (a lot more). He invites the reader to jump in and play with them too. I recently spent some time grappling with impossibly huge magnitudes in my post on Graham’s number, and I appreciated the playful way Schwartz approached “ plex” and other efficient ways to write about very large numbers. Sometimes the sheer magnitude of a number is unfathomable, and Schwartz embraces the challenge of expressing these magnitudes and understanding them once we express them. But Schwartz does not see the request as trivial. It would be easy for a professional mathematician to dismiss questions like that after all, what is more mechanical than big numbers? Name one, and I’ll tell you a bigger one. The book was inspired by the fact that when children find out that Schwartz is a mathematician, they often ask him about big numbers. In it, Schwartz moves from counting by ones to counting by tens and thousands, to ever more abstract ways of representing quantities too huge for human comprehension. He has two daughters, and in 2010, he wrote You Can Count on Monsters, which uses illustrations of strange and spiky beasts to explore the properties of numbers from 1 to 100. (Disclosure: I am an editor of the American Mathematical Society Blog on Math Blogs.) But this is not Schwartz's first foray into talking about math with kids. Really Big Numbers by Richard Schwartz, a mathematician at Brown University, is the first children's book published by the American Mathematical Society. Really Big Numbers by Richard Evan Schwartz “Now and then we pluck numbers from the blur…numbers which have no names except the ones we might now give them…souvenirs from alien, unknowable worlds.” Really Big Numbers by Richard Schwartz will be published by the American Mathematical Society on July 3, 2014. ![]()
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