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.
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:
