Maths and me... hmm... I refuse to agree that I was bad at it in school, coz I was not (most of the times) - but the 12th grade maths exam was definitely a low point - I was jaded with teachers who didn't know what they were talking about (having themselves mugged every bit of every line perhaps, and their vain attempts at teaching concepts they themselves didn't have a grasp of).... I won't say that for the particular Maths teacher in my 12th grade, coz she was a splendid woman ( she is!) but the trickery of getting the subject of Maths beyond just the usual drag .. and into the "interest" part of ones subconscious?!... umm, I donno whether she did that to me.
So here I picked up a book that looked quite interesting... and the author has done a simply superb job of explaining soooo many doubts of mine (which I am sure perked up in my head when I was learning them, but dare you question silly usual "given assumptions" - don't ask why - that's how we learned... or I learned). So she details out fractions, irrational numbers, Fibonacci series, magic numbers, multipliers, short-cuts and what not's. There is an abundance of interesting detail on well known mathematicians ( none of my teachers ever told me any of That!) - Gauss, Newton, Einstein, Fermat, Napier, Archimedes, Pascal, Eratosthenes, Goldbach etc. .. about their personalities, how they became Mathematicians and what made them tick - also what paranoia each one had etc. - that info makes them so much more comprehensible!
Ahh.... also as the name of the book goes - there are SUCH interesting details about Pi i.e. the value 3.14 and how it is part of soooooo many things in nature even, symbols and signs - things we normally wouldn't know.
There is also an interesting bit on Pythagoras, Pythagorean's and algebra- Ooh what a treasure trove of a book!!
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