91ÌÒÉ«

Over several years, while writing Genius at Play, my biography of the always wondrous yet often pernickety one-of-a-kind mathematician John Horton Conway, I was plied by my subject with a smorgasbord of tales.

The history of language and mathematical notation is filled with chance and serendipity. I want readers to see mathematics as a living organism, a living subject, with a history. Mathematics is all about logical truth, and the discipline seems forged in steel. But in fact, mathematics evolved through different phases.

The Declaration of Independence is a mathematical document. It starts by proclaiming certain truths to be self-evident and proceeds to list them. In math, such statements are the axioms of a theory.

When I was a kid, you could actually look inside a radio and see all sorts of neat stuff in there, like the amazing mechanical linkages of the tuning mechanism, or the mysterious, soft yellow glow of the vacuum tubes (the transistor hadn’t yet completely replaced tubes). The wonders of what I could see inside my parents’ 1947 AM/FM radio console hooked me.

Pi is magic. It is a number that is infinite, universal, transcendental, and irrational. It appears everywhere, and my mathematician friends tell me that Pi is as close to religion as you can get in math.