The Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Numbers: Revised Edition (Penguin Press Science)

Why was the number of Hardy's taxi significant? Why does Graham's number need its own notation? How many grains of sand would fill the universe? What is the connection between the Golden Ratio and sunflowers? All these questions and a host more are answered in this fascinating book, which has now been revised, with nearly 200 new entries and hundreds of additions to the original entries. From minus one and its square root -- via cyclic, weird, perfect, untouchable, and lucky numbers; Pascal's triangle and the Syracuse algorithm; music, magic, and maps; pancakes, polyhedrons, and palindromes -- to numbers so large that they boggle the imagination, all you ever wanted to know about numbers is compiled here with a comprehensive index.