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

Menninger, Karl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0486270963 ISBN 13: 9780486270968

Publisher: Dover Publications, 2011

Synopsis

'The historian of mathematics will find much to interest him here . . . while the casual reader is likely to be intrigued by the author's superior narrative ability." — Library Journal
This book is not only a fascinating introduction to the concept of number and to numbers themselves, hut a multifaceted linguistic and historical analysis of how numbers have developed and evolved in many different cultures. Drawing on evidence from history, literature, philosophy and ethnology, noted German scholar Karl Menninger. recounts the development of numbers both as they are spoken (and written as words) and as symbolic abstract numerals that can he readily manipulated and combined.
Despite the immense erudition the author brings to the topic, he maintains a light tone throughout, presenting much of the information in anecdotal form. Moreover, almost 300 illustrations (photographs and drawings) and many comparative language tables serve to enhance the text. The author begins with a lucid treatment of number sequence and number language, including the formation of number words in both Indo-European and non-IndoEuropean languages, hidden number words and the evolution of the number sequence. He then turns to written numerals and computations: finger counting, folk symbols for numbers, alphabetical numerals, the "German" Roman numerals, the abacus and more. The final section concerns the development of our modem decimal system, with its place notation and zero, based on the Indian number system, and its introduction to the West through the work of the Italian mathematician Fibonacci. The author concludes with a review of spoken numbers and number symbols in China and Japan.
"The book is especially good on early counting and calculating devices: primitive tally sticks, the knotted cords of ancient Peru, the elaborate finger symbols once used for numbers, counting boards with movable counters, and of course the abacus." — Martin Gardner, Book World

About this title

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0486270963
• ISBN 13: 9780486270968
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 510