If, like me, you are old enough to remember the book “Logarithms and Other Mathematical Tables” from your schooldays, but you hanker for something with a little more substance - something that will take a bit longer to read - then this might be the book you have been yearning for. It’s just too bad the “search inside” facility for this book only goes as far as page 6 … there’s another 594 pages before you get to the end - although to be fair the first 6 pages give a very good flavour of what’s to come.
Make sure you take a look at the customer reviews too.
This quotation is often attributed to Mark Twain, but poor Mr Twain gets attributed with almost everything these days, along with Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill. There’s a writeup from York University’s Mathematics Faculty about the true origin of the phrase, for anyone who is interested. But I digress.
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As computers get more and more powerful, and programmers get better and better, one day someone, somewhere is going to work out a really fast way to compute as many digits of some of the strange and esoteric number like Pi. If you are ever tempted to do so, DON’T!
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I have a friend who is a croupier. Well, actually, an ex-croupier. She no longer croups, but when she did she was, apparently, very good at it. So good, in fact, that eventually she was put in charge of a number of other croupiers and had to oversee them and the punters in the very posh casino in which she worked. Anyway …
… one of the games she had to oversee was roulette. You know, a wheel, some numbers, a ball and lots of money being placed in bets. The house has a small but significant edge on the odds, so over time the house always wins. However …
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