The Universal History of Numbers

In an interview on Maths

Your other choices are not fictional though.

My next book is by Georges Ifrah, who you could say is the real ‘man who counted’. The French have what is probably the best tradition of popular maths in the world: they love their science, their maths, their engineering and philosophy. And from 1650 to 1850 probably the largest percentage of the great mathematicians were French: Pascal, Fermat, Laplace, Lagrange and the rest.

Ifrah was a schoolteacher who kept being asked by his pupils, ‘Where do numbers come from?’ He began to research it and – weirdly – it turned out no one had bothered to ask this question in the same way. He’s not an academic, nor is he a writer: he’s a massively obsessed schoolteacher on a mission. So the book is a bit sprawling and doesn’t have much of a narrative but it is absolutely incredible. He goes through each culture and describes why they thought of numbers and how they counted. So we have it explained here exactly how the Maya counted, the Sumerians, Hebrews, exactly how the ancient Chinese counted, all different types of tally systems, hand systems, how the abacus works.

Then halfway through it changes and becomes largely about India because Ifrah realises that our own number system really originated in India. Our number system being what we call Arabic numerals and which are really Indian numerals. What you realise from reading The Universal History of Numbers is that everything before India is just a curiosity really.

The three things that define our number system are: only ten digits, zero to nine; a place value system, which isn’t true of Roman numerals; and the use of zero, because with a zero it enables easy multiplication and it then becomes feasible for the lay person to calculate, which wasn’t really possible with Roman numerals.

So the book then becomes an encyclopaedia of all things Indian – a bit eccentric, but so full of information that when I was writing my book this was on my desk at all times to refer to. It’s the bible of counting and where numbers came from.

It’s an enormous, rectangular format.

Well worth having in among any other awkwardly shaped books you might have. Ifrah has never really done anything since, and he’s described here as ‘an independent scholar’ who was ‘the despair of his own maths teacher’. He funded his research around the world on the ten-year project by doing jobs as a waiter and taxi driver.