Book

The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers

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Author
David Wells
Ages
14+

Look up 1729 to see why it is 'among the most famous of all numbers'. Look up 0.7404 () to discover that this is the density of closely packed identical spheres in what is believed by many mathematicians (though it was at that time an unproven hypothesis) and is known by all physicists and greengrocers to be the optimal packing. Look up Graham's number (the last one in the book), which is inconceivably big: even written as a tower of powers () it would take up far more ink than could be made from all the atoms in the universe. It is an upper bound for a quantity in Ramsey theory whose actual value is believed to be about 6. A book to be dipped into at leisure.