Book Review

Beautifully and devotedly made, this large thin book for kids is a cheerful and eccentric guide to the first 156 integers, a concise summary of the next ones up to 1000, and notes in passing a very few landmarks on the long, long road past googol and googolplex to that infinity which is “countable but goes on forever”.

The book is an instructive amusement for the clubs and classes and libraries of arithmetic students who are coming to know the subtle art of counting. The extraordinary Ramanujan once remarked that even a random choice, 1729, was interesting, as the smallest number expressible in more than one way as the sum of two cubes. Very few minds like his are met, but every young student ought for once have the chance to befriend some integer.

~ Philip amd Phylis Morrison, Scientific American exerpt