RSSeNEWS to be determined...

Alex Bellos, mathematician and former South America correspondent for the Guardian, has just published a book intended to show that maths is not just for geeks.

Having studied mathematics and philosophy at university, Alex says: "even though I abandoned academic maths as soon as I graduated, I always had the feeling that one day I would return to it."

Each chapter in Numberland is self-contained and can be read independently from the rest. Bellos says more than half the maths would be understandable to the average 16-year-old. In researching the book he travelled to Japan, India, Germany, France and the US (and the UK too of course). He examines, amongst other things:

• why Asian languages make numbers easier to learn because of the way the words are constructed
• how children are taught to use the abacus in Japan, which they then  use by imagining it
• the history of maths including the origins of Tetris and the Rubik's Cube
• the application of probability theory to gambling with insights into slot machines, insurance, lotteries and a neat explanation of Pascal's wager on the existence of God
• why a 50p piece is a revolutionary shape which will always roll smoothly.

The book is published by Bloomsbury in the UK and will appear in the US in June published by Free Press with the title, Here's Looking at Euclid