Number Words and Number Symbols: A Cultural History of Numbers - Softcover

Menninger, Karl

3.98 out of 5 stars

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9780262630610: Number Words and Number Symbols: A Cultural History of Numbers

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262630613 ISBN 13: 9780262630610

Publisher: Mit Pr, 1977

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Book by Menninger, Karl

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Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

Review

"'It must have required many ages,' Bertrand Russell once wrote, 'to discover that a brace of pheasants and a couple of days were both instances of the number 2.' Number Words and Number Symbols, by the late Karl W. Menninger, is a magnificent history of how mankind discovered numbers, invented a bewildering variety of ways to name, symbolize and manipulate them, and how those ways altered over the millennia.

"Menninger was a German mathematician of such panoramic interests and expository skill that he became one of his country's most widely read authors of nontechnical books on mathematics. This splendid translation of the revised 1958 edition of Menninger's most ambitious work is a beautiful volume. Its large pages are handsomely bound, carefully indexed, and enriched by 282 pictures, mostly photographs, that are as fascinating as the lively text itself.

"Menninger's story is a colorful mix of mathematics, linguistics and cultural anthropology."
—Martin Gardner, BookWorld

"The book points out many fascinating but not obvious connections between the varied meanings of words used today (such as score and tally) and between words in different languages which have common roots. Although the philological and linguistic scholarship displayed in these explorations is awe-inspiring, the writing is so direct and colorful that one need be neither a philologist nor a mathematician to enjoy it."
—Scripta Mathematica