What You Need To Know About Numbers

July 7, 2010

Interview with Alex Bellos, author of the book Here's Looking at Euclid: A Surprising Excursion Through the Astonishing World of Math

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Mike Carruthers:
I was never particularly good at math I suppose because I found it so difficult, but it turns out…

Alex Bellos:
Even the people who are good at math find it difficult. Math is effortful it’s like a muscle that you need to train so it’s not surprising that people find math difficult – because it is.
 

Alex Bellos, author of the book Here's Looking at Euclid, says some people have trouble with math because they suffer from something called dyscalculia, it like dyslexia.

Which is an inability to understand numbers and it affects exactly the same amount of the population (a different part of the population) that like dyslexia has no bearing on overall intelligence. So you can be highly intelligent and yet still not quite understand numbers – that’s one reason why lots of people aren’t very good at math.

Math got a lot easier when zero showed up. For a long time there was no zero.

So where does zero come from? It actually comes from India roundabout in the 5th Century and then came from India through the Arab world to Europe which is why the numerals that we use now (which have the zero in it) are called Arabic numerals but really they came from India. And it came from a mystical religious view of the world – its this idea that you give everything away and be left with nothing but that nothing is something – in fact that nothing is everything. When there’s nothing (mathematically) well let’s call that something too and that was probably the greatest advance that was made.
 

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here