The Magic of Numbers: Part One of Three with Guided Notes

If I were given a nickel for every time I have recommended E.T. Bell’s book The Magic of Numbers (1946) over the years, to friends and acquaintances, I would have a rather tall stack of nickels.
Even though it is a wonderful read, sadly the book is not widely available and so I have lent my own, well-thumbed through, copy of the 1946 printing of this book to friends and acquaintances enough times to finally sit and transcribe the book to digital format for general use.
To help you the reader to enjoy The Magic of Numbers I have provided Guided Notes for each chapter (I have transcribed it gratis). As a reader you are in fact remunerating me merely for the Guided Notes that I have prepared for you.
This edition of the New Mathematics for the Millions consists of the first eight chapters of The Magic of Numbers. Parts Two and Three of The Magic of Numbers, will appear in the very near future.
At its printing in 1946 Dr. Eric Temple Bell (1883 – 1960) was a Professor of Mathematics, at the California Institute of Technology.
Dr. E. T. Bell is also the author of
The Magic of Numbers
Queen of the Sciences
Men of Mathematics
Development of Mathematics
Expect more of these titles to appear in the form of transcriptions, with Guided Notes in the future.
******* From the book flap of The Magic of Numbers
How did we ever come to believe what we do about numbers? Why have some of today’s most distinguished physicists suddenly turned to the sixth century B.C. for their basic philosophy of science?
In answering these questions, Eric Temple Bell, perhaps mathematics greatest interpreter, traces the belief in the magical or superhuman powers of numbers from its beginning in the dawn of history to the present time. He discusses the profound and curious way in which number magic has influenced the development of religion, philosophy, science and mathematics, and the struggle of human beings through history to give a coherent account of the infinite.
He interprets the origins of the most revolutionary scientific development in the past 300 years – the twentieth century departure from the use of the experimental method and the return to the Pythagorean Principle of reasoning by Pure Mathematics.
Although the theme of the book is the origin of numbers, no mathematics beyond the simplest arithmetic is needed to follow the story. This is no journey through valleys of dry bones, but rather a fascinating search for the hard core of mathematical theory at the center of ancient wisdom.
Here is the amazing story of the men who thought so that others might act, who had the flair of constructively doubting the traditionally obvious – that rarest of all intellectual gifts. The hero of the book is Pythagoras, born to immortality 500 years before the Christian era, founder of our scientific and technological culture, and of the mystic doctrine that “Everything is Number.”
Doctor Bell shows the growth of this doctrine, its decline in the seventeenth century, and its modern resurgence resplendent in the dazzling symbolism of a brilliant new physics. Into the fabric of the story come the giants of mathematics, some honored in their time, others martyred in their fight for reason against the tyranny of ignorance. Galileo, Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake in 1600, Newton, Nicolai Lobachewsky, the Russian mathematician, Saccheri, Italian Jesuit logician, Berkeley, Irish Bishop of Cloyne and pioneer of pure mathematics, Albert Einstein and others.
With matchless wit and insight Eric Temple Bell has made “The Magic of Numbers” much more than a specific search for origins of mathematical thought. It its entirety it becomes a human history of the development of numerical theory, a living biography of the me who played and play such a great part in our scientific and philosophical developments.