Kate Kitagawa’s “The Secret Lives of Numbers,” co-authored with science journalist and editor Timothy Revell, is a marvel of inclusive storytelling that's greater than a simple summation of facts.
Covering most major areas of mathematics — from calculus to chaos, geometry to numbers theory — each chapter takes an area of math and unpacks the story of its discovery, with particular focus on contributors outside the Eurocentric male norm. The book opens with tally marks scratched on animal bones and progresses to abstract concepts like zero, followed by how humanity uncovered and used mathematics through history. For the mathematics of time itself, however, the authors take a moment to flit forward and backward through history to connect the dots between humanity’s conception of time, space and relativity, culminating in Albert Einstein’s famous equation and the birth of quantum physics.
The Secret Lives of Numbers, by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell. 320 pages, WILLIAM MORROW, Nonfiction.
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