Alex Bellos
speaker
186 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2014
last heard Jun 2014
Alex Bellos’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I was on the Baghdad Road, returning at my camel's slow pace from an excursion to the famous city of Samarra on the banks of the Tigris, when I saw a modestly dressed traveller sitting on a rock who looked as if he was recuperating from a voyage.
The traveller is Beremiz Samir, a Persian mathematician who joins the narrator on a journey that involves dozens of episodes in which he solves problems using his skill with numbers.
At one point, he visits the house of the king's minister, the vizier Ibrahim Malouf.
Passing through a variety of richly furnished rooms hung with tapestry fringed in silver thread, we at last reached the rooms of the king's minister, who was reclining on large cushions and conversing with two friends.
Bérémis impresses the vizier with an unusual way of counting a herd of camels.
He counts the number of hooves in ears and then divides by six.
The camels are a gift for the father of the vizier's 16-year-old wife-to-be, but Bérémis notices that one is missing an ear.
''I wanted to make a small suggestion,'' replied Bérémis.
The gift offered to the father of the delightful Astir would then have a mathematical perfection, the number of camels equal to the square of the age of the beloved.
I love The Man Who Counted.
The book transports you into a magical world of Bedouins, viziers, sheikhs, princes and kings, rich in references to Islamic traditions and locations in the Middle East.
The maths is gentle, accessible and drives the stories.
It's mostly arithmetic, but there are geometrical puzzles too and also curiosities like magic squares.
the man who counted rightly became a bestseller and turned Malbata Han into a household name, a mathematician as famous as Brazil's football stars.
His fans ranged from schoolchildren to the president of Brazil and include Brazil's most famous author, Paulo Coelho.
The book was a literary hoax.
Mabataha never existed.
He was the pen name of Julio César de Melo Isoza, a maths teacher from Rio de Janeiro who never set foot in the Middle East.
He'd had no luck getting his short stories published under his own name, but his love of maths had led into a fascination with Islamic science.
So he decided to write stories about ancient Arabia using the non-duplume Malbatahan, and only the proprietor of the newspaper that printed the stories was in on the joke.
Showing 81–100 of 186 · page 5 of 10
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