The wonders of numbers and Magnum PI

MATHS and I were never really good mates. Easy to accept, and not unique. You give mathematics the cold shoulder all your life only to realise that it is so intertwined with your life that it can just as well be called your silent lover. Look at the computer screen in front of you. Pure mathematics.

Last week I wrestled with a great book that made me comprehend this situation really well. Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell's The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Global History of Mathematics & its Unsung Trailblazers.

I can recommend it to those who felt the same way about maths as I did. For the initiates too. Many of its revelations will be old news to them, but the greater argument of Kitagawa and Revell  should be news to them as well. That argument says it is wrong to think that mathematics originated with the ancient Greeks, has evolved over the years as the intellectual chakra of Western civilisation, and is almost exclusively the domain of European men.

Upon reading, I soon realised two important things. The first was that whenever formulas appear, or things are discussed that you understand nothing about, you have to mutter to yourself it's a “hard word" and let your eye move past. You may be cheating slightly, but that brings me to the second thing. You're actually reading for the embedded stories and the incredible people, all registering on a celebrity spectrum that's remarkable.

There's no sex, drugs or rock 'n' roll here. There are many smart people who behave civilly.

One example: in 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute compiled a list of seven unsolved mathematical problems and offered $1 million for solving each of them. In 2002, Grigori Perelman, a Russian, proved one of them, the so-called Poincaré conjecture. This conjecture makes us understand the possible form(s) of the universe. When the Clay institute wanted to give Perelman his prize money, he turned it down because he wanted to share it with Richard Hamilton. Perelman said his work was based on Hamilton's preparatory studies to such an extent that he could not fully view it as his own.

What a celeb! The day has yet to come when an Oscar winner refuses the prize because he wants to share it with his director.

I thought J Robert Oppenheimer (the atomic bomb man) would have a place of honour in the book, but he's not mentioned. Kitagawa (a mathematics historian) and Revell (a journalist specialising in science research) carry a bunch of people into your skull who very soon fill your gallery of glittering souls.

There is Yu the Great, the Chinese emperor of 4,000 years ago who one day discovered the magic square on the back of a turtle. Imagine a side of a Rubik's Cube with nine squares, each containing a digit. In the top row are 4, 9 and 2. The middle row contains 3, 5 and 7, and below are 8, 1 and 6. If you add up the figures, each row totals 15. Horizontal, vertical and diagonal.

That discovery gave Yu the right to call himself the Emperor of China.

And then there are the Guptas. We know that Mayan culture was the first to conceive of the number zero, but in the time of Chandragupta I, who ruled northern India somewhere between 319 and 350 CE, the Indians made calculations about the moon and the movement of the stars, mostly underlain with mythological elements.

The Guptas were Hindus but they also made allowance for Buddhism and Jainism. The latter were mathematical boffins who invented all sorts of exotic concepts. Like the rajju, which indicates the distance a god can travel in six months (about a million kilometres). Then there is the palya, which indicates the time it takes one to empty a container filled with wool if you take out only one thread each century.

That's the Guptas and their people for you. They think big.

India produced another maths celeb, Srinivasa Ramanujan. As a 23-year-old clerk in Madras, he wrote in 1913 to GH Hardy and JE Littlewood, eminent British mathematicians who gained particular fame for their work on prime numbers. His letter contained formulas that immediately made Hardy and Littlewood realise they were dealing with a genius. They invited him to Cambridge, with a notebook in which he wrote down a large number of mathematical discoveries.

What makes Ramanujan so remarkable? The fact that he was very religious and based most of his discoveries purely on intuition. His life was cut short when he was 32; as a vegetarian, he did not flourish in Britain and died of malnutrition.

There are many more. Like the 16th-century Danish sisters Sophia and Tycho Brahe, who wrestled with the exact position of Mars. They passed the issue on to Johannes Kepler. Then there are the mechanical “computers" that Blaise Pascal designed in the 17th century. My eyes widened at the influence of the mathematician Mādhava of Kerala  in India in the 14th century.

There are still many such people — in many cases women who are placed in their rightful positions in the vast spectrum of mathematical superheroes by Kitagawa and Revell.

The Secret Lives of Numbers is a book I could read and enjoy without understanding everything. It has a place of honour on my bookshelf. I should also mention that all the hard words made me spend a lot of time with Google as an escort. One cannot always read on in ignorance. Facts sometimes count more heavily than people.

The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Global History of Mathematics & its  Unsung Trailblazers, by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell, was published by Penguin and costs R425 at Exclusive Books.

After the traumatic experience of reading Barbra Streisand's memoir and discovering the new celebs the maths book introduced me to, I was reluctant to pick up Tom Selleck's memoir, You Never Know. He's a nice guy, a role model for Moustache City — but what could he really have to say for himself?

I liked him as Thomas Magnum and Frank Reagan in his two big TV shows, but as a human? My concern was misplaced. Selleck doesn't lift a single veil on any deeper secrets. His privacy remains intact. And the memoir barely touches on Blue Bloods, his greatest achievement.

What he does do is tell how a naughty-ass teenager evolves into someone calm enough to resist making Thomas Magnum just another detective, and eventually made the makers of the series see that they should give him a chance to create his version of Magnum. He made them all multi-millionaires.

There are few big revelations, but you do get an idea of how it happened that an ordinary nice guy managed to stay standing and clean in Hollywood. He mentions many names, great and airy spirits, but he is so anti-celeb that he doesn't even include an index of names at the back of the book.

You Never Know: A Memoir, by Tom Selleck, was published by HarperCollins and costs R592 at Exclusive Books.

♦ VWB ♦

BE PART OF THE CONVERSATION: Go to the bottom of this page to share your opinion. We look forward to hearing from you.