This book is child from marriage of mathematical number theory and biology. The largest bang bang better known as big bang happened billions of years ago and de-facto after Newton showed be either universe heavens or earthly humans the mathematics is the same. The universe has a mathematical precision in its working. But Homo Sapiens the only Homo surviving has the counting ability unparalleled to any living being alive is not the only one here who can count.
Horse named clever Hans could count when his master was present. Fishes tend to join the bigger shoals as it is more shelter and safe. Amphibians are intelligent too. Reptiles of all the tree of life do not have numerical cognitive trait, include lizards, snakes turtle and crocodiles. Birds are the latest arrivals in tree of life, they have great chromatic ability and they are natural born mathematicians. Mammals can count. Arthropods meaning insects include the smartest of all Honeybees.
Next part of book author goes on to count the number of neurons of the brains of the species. and there lies the counting faculty, he says for left brain can have small numbers and short term memory and right brain can store monster numbers. People who can calculate in their heads are termed to be affected with a syndrome called dyscalcullia.
There was a bow and arrow master. He used to go to market place and show arrow splitting and impress customers. Everybody clapped and cheered but every time when crowd would fall silent nearby shopkeeper will say “its just a matter of practice”. That arrow master ignored but once he got enraged and asked that other shopkeeper, why. He Showed his own oil jugglery which involved pouring a whole jar of oil from above head to a bottle kept on the ground into a bottle, without spilling any oil. So this story and the book review below both explain the one and same thing that is of practising one’s own skills.
Beethoven and Mozart were trained in recognising pitch. The ability is called as someone with the absolute pitch. Someone who could recognise any type of sound and tell exactly which key of which instrument will produce this exact pitch and this is marvellous that one in 10,000 have this ability.
Author walks on to experimentally prove that solitary practice is the deliberate practice. and this above absolute pitch is not a gift but rather a deliberate practice. There he also discusses the 10,000 hour rule of becoming an expert. He says
Deliberate practice is deliberate, that is, it requires a person’s full attention and conscious actions. It isn’t enough to simply follow a teacher’s or coach’s directions. The student must concentrate on the specific goal for his or her practice activity so that adjustments can be made to control practice.
The whole book has brought the insight from field of sorts and recorded the data from there and tried to out large numbers. Then author moves on to mathematics where he is trying to tell that mathematical rigour of mathematicians way ahead of their contemporaries did not spring form any current necessity but rather the mind expanded because of deliberate practice and they discovered my theorems still to be used in real world. Examples are higher dimensions and topology to name a few. Pythagorean believed that everything which exist is physical and hence they never made any symbols they simply calculated in distances. they were highly religious of their beliefs but when a diagonal of square was to be measured they did not recognise square roots of numbers. they believed in whole numbers. that oldest theories are very true and are getting revisited when analytical geometry is studies.
So I would suggest this book to be read by maths lovers who want some motive and encouragement to practice maths. This is also recommended by Grant sanderson the creator of 3Blue1Brown.
sriramlamsal 