Product Description

What does A4 paper have in common with Mozart's Requiem?

Why does three have a dark side?

Was zero discovered or invented?

With searching questions such as these, Andrew Hodges takes apart the numbers 1 to 9 and gathers up the pieces, exploring such various topics as musical harmony, the chemistry of sunflowers and the logic of the game Paper, Scissors, Stone on the way.

In One to Nine, Hodges unveils a universal language which has its roots in antiquity and yet enables us to connect with the far reaches of the universe. Whether it is explaining how subatomic particles behave or challenging you to the ultimate sudoku puzzle, this is a book which succeeds in making the unfathomable enticing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104817 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

The Daily Telegraph, September 22, 2007
One to Nine - ostensibly a simple snapshot of the mathematical world - is a virtuoso stream of consciousness containing everything important there is to say about numbers in just over 300 pages. It contains multitudes. It is cogent, charming and deeply personal, all at once.

Seven Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph, September 23, 2007
In his dazzling chapter about the number four, Hodges moves within a few pages from Strauss's last songs to to the sizes of notepaper (A4 and the rest) to Fermat's last theorem with such ease that we hardly notice. These and other anecdotes make this the ideal book for everyone interested in the only universal language, especially if their mathematical curiosity exceeds their skill.

About the Author
Andrew Hodges is best known as the author of Alan Turing: The Enigma, the story of the extraordinary British computer pioneer and codebreaker, described by the New Yorker as `one of the finest scientific biographies ever written'. He is also active in research into fundamental physics, a colleague of Roger Penrose, and a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford University.

Customer Reviews

Couldn't get past chapter 1!
I am not innumerate or illiterate (of course, that is just my opinion) but I found chapter 1 of this book hard going and decided enough was enough. My problems with the book are that there is too much flitting from subject to subject - some have called this "a free-wheeling approach", "free association" and "brainstorming". I thought it was a hotchpotch of random facts. I think the only useful lesson in that chapter was around the "unique primacy of numbers" but that was so poorly explained that I had to reread it several times before I understood it. I'm afraid that I couldn't continue.

Bizarre but delightful popular science
It is unlikely there will ever be a popular science book with more references to the Pet Shop Boys than this one. 'One to nine' by Andrew Hodges, then, is a unique work. On the surface it's about mathematical trivia, well organized into nine chapters dealing with the numbers 1 to 9. This is a misleading thought.

Actually, this is a 300 page brainstorm, with mr. Hodges freely associating on any subject he happens to stumble upon, be it sudokus or the meaning of the number 5 in George Orwell's '1984'. Somewhere the reader even finds himself talked to by a drug dealer explaining why one cannot divide 0 by 0. The book is structured more like an avantgarde novel than a work of nonfiction. The numbers become characters, and only through them the reader becomes aware of themes woven into the chapters, such as the heroic feats of Kurt Gödel.

Those seeking comprehensive knowledge of numerology are likely to be left utterly confused. Those willing to be taken on an imaginative journey involving numbers will find this a bizarre but delightful book.

Not for the mathematically challenged
Oxford Fellow Andrew Hodges, who wrote the very well received biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1992), uses--rather quixotically I might say--the one to nine format to delve into the world of mathematics. His emphasis is on number theory, mathematics as applied to physics, and mathematics as applied to cryptology. The text is difficult, and the puzzles strewn throughout, whether labeled, EASY, GENTLE, TOUGH, HARD, TRICKY or DEADLY, proved mostly too difficult for this non-mathematician.

For those readers versed in number theory, that branch of mathematics in which numbers are explored purely for their own sake without even the dream of a practical application, this book is probably a delight. And for cryptologists it is probably a double delight since Hodges explores in some considerable depth the delicious irony of how pure mathematics became contaminated, as it were, when it was noticed some years ago that the encryption of messages could be facilitated by using very large numbers with unique divisors. While it is easy to multiply two even very large numbers and get a unique result it is enormously difficult to find the unique factors that make up a very large number.

At any rate that is my understanding. And if I have gotten it wrong it is only because I am not much of a mathematician. Which brings me to the central criticism of this book. To put it bluntly I don't think anyone but a mathematician can fully appreciate Andrew Hodges' text. It's that difficult. Additionally, Hodges, who is a physicist as well as a mathematician, brings string and twistor theory into the fray further multiplying the difficulties for the general reader.

But even more off-putting (and this explains some of the negative reviews this book has garnered) is the fact that the book is more than a bit self-indulgent. Hodges's political views are a bit too obvious and gratuitous (although not necessarily disagreeable). He digresses often, sometimes whimsically, sometimes unaccountably. He employs naked jargon, insider allusions, and unexplained references. His subject matter spills over and jumps around from one chapter to other making the "One to Nine" structure seem artificial what with matter pertaining to the number six, for example, appearing in the chapter on the number seven and vice-versa.

I think it's obvious that the sort of book that Hodges has written here must needs another sort of structure, perhaps in three parts, one dealing with encryption, the second with pure number theory, and the third with mathematical physics. He is following to some extent (as he acknowledges) the structure that Constance Reid used so successfully in "From Zero to Infinity" (1956, new edition 2006) in which the chapters were entitled "Zero," "One," "Two,"..."Nine," and then "e" and "Aleph Zero." It's too bad that Hodges didn't emulate Reid's reader friendly prose--and he's a good enough writer to do it--instead of her structure.

Finally I didn't like the fact that the reader has to go to a Website to get the answers to the puzzles!