THE NUMBER
MYSTERIES
A Mathematical Odyssey Through
Every Day Life
MARCUS DU SAUTOY
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in 2010
Copyright © Marcus du Sautoy
The right of Marcus du Sautoy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content or written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual or technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007278626
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 9780007362561 Version: 2017-08-22
For Shani
CONTENTS
One - The Curious Incident of the Never-ending Primes
Two - The Story of the Elusive Shape
Three - The Secret of the Winning Streak
Four - The Case of the Uncrackable Code
Five - The Quest to Predict the Future
Is climate change a reality? Will the solar system suddenly fly apart? Is it safe to send your credit card number over the Internet? How can I beat the casino?
Ever since we’ve been able to communicate, we’ve been asking questions—trying to make predictions about what the future holds, negotiating the environment around us. The most powerful tool that humans have created to navigate the wild and complex world we live in is mathematics.
From predicting the trajectory of a football to charting the population of lemmings, from cracking codes to winning at Monopoly, mathematics has provided the secret language to unlock nature’s mysteries. But mathematicians don’t have all the answers. There are many deep and fundamental questions we are still struggling to crack.
In each chapter of The Number Mysteries I want to take you on a journey through the big themes of mathematics, and at the end of each chapter I will reveal a mathematical mystery that no one has yet been able to solve. These are some of the great unsolved problems of all time.
But solving one of these conundrums won’t just bring you mathematical fame—it will also bring you an astronomical fortune. An America businessman, Landon Clay, has offered a prize of a million dollars for the solution to each of these mathematical mysteries. You might think it strange that a businessman should want to hand out such big prizes for solving mathematical puzzles. But he knows that the whole of science, technology, the economy and even the future of our planet relies on mathematics.
Each of the five chapters of this book introduces you to one of these million-dollar puzzles.
Chapter 1, The Curious Incident of the Never Ending Primes, takes as its theme the most basic object of mathematics: number. I will introduce you to the primes, the most important numbers in mathematics but also the most enigmatic. A mathematical million awaits the person who can unravel their secrets.
In Chapter 2, The Story of the Elusive Shape, we take a journey through nature’s weird and wonderful shapes: from dice to bubbles, from tea bags to snowflakes. Ultimately we tackle the biggest challenge of them all—what shape is our universe?
Chapter 3, The Secret of the Winning Streak, will show you how the mathematics of logic and probability can give you the edge when it comes to playing games. Whether you like playing with Monopoly money or gambling with real cash, mathematics is often the secret to coming out on top. But there are some simple games that still fox even the greatest minds.
Cryptography is the subject of Chapter