The Book of Numbers: The Ultimate Compendium of Facts About Figures Book

What do these have in common: people who have set foot on the moon, signs of the zodiac and the letters of the Hawaiian alphabet? The answer is the number 12, as this Ultimate Compendium of Facts about Figures will tell you, along with dozens of related facts and statistics, including numerical films (Twelve Angry Men), books (The Wind's Twelve Quarters), and lists (the 12 labours of Hercules).Arranged in numerical order, the book sets out to reference number facts and trivia. Smaller numbers get the fullest treatment, but selected larger numbers are also covered, into the billions. A typical entry, for the number 124, reveals:Japanese emperors in an unbroken line from the same family kilometres length of the coastline of Benin pounds record weight for a pumpkin people per square mile in New Hampshire.Many measurements are included, although strictly these only approximate whole numbers and depend on the units used. Lengths and weights (metric and imperial), ages, temperatures and even percentages make it in, as do moving targets like the largest entry: 4,985,567,071,200--the size of the US national debt in 1995. Mathematicians will despair, and a reader looking for facts about numbers themselves would do better with a book like David Wells' Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers.But William Hartston, best known for his chess expertise, follows his earlier Ultimate Irrelevant Encyclopedia and Odd Dates Only, with a collection that will appeal to anyone looking for a store of quirky facts having a numerical element. --Frank PennycookRead More