Photograph: Wong Maye-E/AP Mathematics has revealed the underlying structures of nature, such as the golden ratio that defines the shape of a nautilus's shell. Strings of data are dull, you might think, percentages and sums best left to calculators (or, these days, Google). After studying mathematics and philosophy at university I joined the Evening Argus in Brighton as a trainee reporter. Alex Bellos has a very good way of writing, easy to read and sprinkled, sparingly, with a bit of humour too - thoroughly enjoyable.

At this point, the book also irritated my psoriasis, as it reminded me of two of my education failures: (1) the slide rule; and (2) logarithms. It's no mean feat to be able to explain concepts like Zeno's paradox, regression to the mean, squaring a circle and Riemann's non-Euclidean geometry without using any equations. The title is enough however, to put off my non-mathsy girlfriend, who accused me of being a "geek" for reading it. Absolutely loved it, it is a romp through the history of maths in bite sized chunks which investigate certain aspects, e.Mathematicians have explored ever more abstract worlds and geometries, floating in dimensions that may or may not exist and finding symmetries and patterns in hard-to-imagine shapes. Our counting numbers (1, 2, 3, etc) are probably less than 10,000 years old, an offshoot of language, and there were probably no more than a handful of these discrete units for most of that time. When I saw this book on one of my frequent browses I thought that sounds right up my street so bought it (it had good reviews). He makes a frank observation that should give pause to any reader: “By age 16, schoolkids have learned almost no math beyond what was already known in the mid-seventeenth century, and likewise by the time they are 18, they have not gone beyond the mid-eighteenth century.

The highest found (at the time of publication of the book) was 2 I joined the Guardian in 1994 as a reporter and in 1998 moved to Rio de Janeiro, where I spent five years as the paper’s South America correspondent. From here, the book backtracks into another chapter on games, or more accurately gaming, and the evolution of probability theory, which, as any derivatives trader with an ounce of conscience can attest, is the root of the current economic downturn if you don't count Obamacare and high tax rates on corporations and the rich (ok, that was sarcasm). He commences by describing how different cultures use counting and numbers, and in many ways this is the most interesting part of the book.In India he finds the brilliant mathematical insights of the Buddha and in Japan he visits the creator of Sudoku and explores the delights of mathematical games. I found Simon Singh's 'Fermat's Last Theorem' a bit of a page turner which either makes me a right saddo or an intellectual genius. We found logarithms (which were the only way to do complex engineering sums before calculators came along) and realised that the collective behaviour of people or molecules was predictable, even if it seemed random. All of our books are 100% brand new, unread and purchased directly from the publishers in bulk allowing us to pass the huge savings on to you! My feeling is though, that anyone without mathematical training may start to lose interest at about Chapter 5, when algebra is introduced.

He has organized the book in the way that allows him to be chronological while also taking diversions from time to time to connect with what's happening now in the field of mathematics. The chapter uses maths to confirm that there are a few clever clogs who can improve gambling odds but the rest of us are easy prey to owners of casinos whose only redeeming quality is that they are as stupid as the rest of us in understanding how probability theory works and must therefore put their faith in the quants they employ, much like the purchasers of derivatives products. Counting proper (and associated manipulations of numbers and quantities) took off when civilisations started to grow and rulers needed to know how much land their citizens had and, therefore, how much tax they should pay. In probing the many intrigues of that most beloved of numbers, pi, he visits with two brothers so obsessed with the elusive number that they built a supercomputer in their Manhattan apartment to study it.Mathematical thought is one of the great achievements of the human race, and arguably the foundation of all human progress. He eats a potato crisp whose revolutionary shape was unpalatable to the ancient Greeks, and he shows the deep connections between maths, religion and philosophy. As the book progresses, so does the abstract nature of the subject matter, and the concept of pi provides the perfect bridge between numeracy and philosophy, which had already emerged with the chapter on zero.