This book is part of my 2010 Booklist. See the full-list on this blog, or visit my Amazon Store for links to purchase any of them.

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I picked this book up at Carroll & Carroll, a bookstore not far from where I grew up. I’m a fan of trivia books in general; collecting facts is just a hobby of mine.

This particular book is a tour de force through the numbers 1 to 200.  The range of numbers is somewhat arbitrary, and this becomes evident once you pass 128 or so.

The format of the book is not a standard chapter-based text. Niederman allocates a section to each number. The section heading is the number itself, along with its factors or a designation as a prime number. Below that are a series of short anecdotes about that number.

The first 70 digits are very fascinating. Niederman spends a couple pages at times discussing all the different interesting factoids about particular numbers. Many of them are strictly math-related: whether or not a number is prime, what kind of prime it is, what sorts of numerical relationship it has with itself and with other numbers.

But many of the other facts, early on, are more conventional trivia. Here is an arbitrary sampling:

  • In the United States, the stop sign has officially been an octagon since the 1920s, the idea being that motorists could recognize its distinctive shape even from the reverse side. Most of the English-speaking world uses the same construction. (#8, p. 35-6)
  • It is commonly believed that seven shufles are the right amount to produce a random order of 52 cards, but eight perfect riffle shuffles will return a 52-card deck to its original order. (#8 p. 36)
  • There are 16 basic personality types in the Myers-Briggs classification system, devised by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers in accordance with ideas published by Carl Jung in 1921. … [text continues in more detail]  (#16, p. 64)
  • In chess, a player can claim a draw if no piece has been captured and no pawn has been moved for the previous 50 moves. This rule was apparently first proposed in 1561 by Ruy Lopez, whose name now adorns a classic chess opening. Some 430 years later, Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov battled for over 50 moves after reaching an end position in which Karpov held two knights and a bishop while Kasparov held just a rook. … [text continues] (#50, p. 146)
  • 355/113 is an extremely good approximation of Pi (355/113 = 3.1415929… while pi = 3.1415926…). It was discovered in the fifth century AD by Chinese mathematician and astronomer Tsu Ch’ung-Chih. (#113, p. 235)
  • Between 1904 and 1960 (with the exception of 1919), a baseball season consisted of 154 games. With eight teams in each league, each team played the other seven teams in its league 22 times apiece. … [text continues] (#154, p. 252)

Those are some of the shorter trivia; the longer ones are too lengthy to reprint here.

Niederman has an entertaining style of writing that was able to maintain my interest throughout the book. That said, I question his judgement on choosing 200 as the upper limit. As I mentioned before, the facts and interesting tidbits become far more sparse after ~100). Case in point:  #100 shows up on page 226. #200 ends on p. 274. I would have liked to see more content for the first 100 numbers.

It was worth reading – I would classify it in the same category as “Why is their anti-freeze in my toothpaste?” — useful for trivia reference, and well-suited for restroom reading.

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