The Number Devil

Hans Magnus Enzensberger,

Michael Henry Heim (Translator)

Granta Books, 2000

ISBN 1862 07828 9, 264 pages

Price Approx £6.50 (Paperback)

I found this among the children’s books, but it is much too good to be reserved for

children only. The Number Devil comes to visit Robert each night in his dreams and

illustrates the world of numbers in a most engaging way. He needs one thing and one

thing only: one. Fractions are dealt with easily because one piece of chewing gum can

be broken in two: one gum, two people – the gum goes on top, the people on the

bottom - . He finds out that the Romans had no zero and is introduced to powers

and place value through ‘hopping numbers.’ By the third night he has met numbers of

the garden variety and the prima donnas too. Unreasonable numbers follow and

coconuts help with triangle numbers. The entertainment continues with Fibonacci

numbers investigated through generations of rabbits and then there’s the blanketyblank

1.618... . Enzensberger includes a useful list of “official” terms. He says this is

“… just in case The Number Devil falls into the hands of mathematics teachers.” It

made me smile a lot, which I feel is a good recommendation for a book about maths!