Thinking in Numbers by Daniel Tammet: review

'Thinking in Numbers' is an eclectic set of essays on maths and life by the autistic savant Daniel Tammet

By Manjit Kumar 22 August 2012 • 7:00am

Daniel Tammet, whose new collection of essays is 'Thinking in Numbers' Credit: Photo: Jerome Tabet

Pi is a number that has gripped the imagination of many a mathematician, professional and amateur, throughout history. It’s the number that is always generated when the circumference of a circle is divided by its diameter. Its special appeal lies in the fact that it has no last digit; it starts 3.14159265 and goes on forever. On March 14 2004, Daniel Tammet publicly recited from memory pi to 22,514 decimal places. It took him five hours and nine minutes.

“Printed out on crisp, letter-sized sheets of paper, a thousand digits to a page, I gazed on them as a painter gazes on a favourite landscape”, writes Tammet in his new book, before going on to try to explain how he accomplished the near impossible.

His astonishing feat of memory would not surprise the readers of his two previous memoirs, Born on a Blue Day (2006) and Embracing the Wide Sky (2009). Tammet was diagnosed eight years ago with high-functioning autistic savant syndrome; as he puts it, “the connections in my brain, since birth, had formed unusual circuits.” While the rest of us are barely aware of the way in which the interplay between numerical concepts saturates the way we experience the world, Tammet is able to join the dots with startling lucidity.

Thinking in Numbers is a collection of 25 essays in which Tammet explores what he calls “the maths of life”. The book, he writes, “entertains pure possibilities”, immune to prior experience or expectation. “The fact that we have never read an endless book,” he writes, “or counted to infinity, or made contact with an extraterrestrial civilization should not prevent us from wondering: what if?”

Inevitably Tammet’s choice of subjects is personal, and wonderfully eclectic. Several pieces are biographical, prompted by imagining a young Shakespeare learning about zero, a new idea in 16th-century schools, or the calendar created for the Sultan Jalal al-Din by the poet and mathematician Omar Khayyám that was more accurate than the later Gregorian version. Other essays were inspired by the snows of Quebec, counting sheep in Iceland, and the debates of ancient Greece which shaped the development of the Western mathematical imagination.

What lifts Tammet’s entertaining collection above the ordinary are the often surprising links that he sees, explores and explains. In “Shapes of Speech” he connects Pythagoras and Euclid, mathematics and rhetoric, to Abraham Lincoln’s defence of the Union as America edged towards civil war. “We are not enemies,” Lincoln had said, “but friends.” Perhaps, says Tammet, Lincoln was thinking of a proverb attributed to Pythagoras: “Friendship is equality.”

In “Proverbs and Times Tables”, Tammet suggests that one hundred proverbs sum up the essence of a culture. One hundred multiplication facts (two times two is four, seven times six is 42 etc) compose the times tables. Like proverbs, these numerical statements are always short, fixed, and pithy, yet they don’t stick in our heads as proverbs do. If only multiplication tables could be constructed in a form that was as memorable as that of a proverb, says Tammet, many youthful blushes, and even those of the odd world-class mathematician, would be spared. For Tammet, form is all-important.

The interplay between words and numbers is a recurring theme. In a fine essay, “Poetry of the Primes”, he explores the relationships between two verse forms – the sestina and the haiku – and prime numbers. The haiku’s three lines contain three, five and seven syllables. Three, five and seven are the first three odd primes. The power of the sestina relies on repetition. The same six words, one at the end of each line, persist and permute across every stanza. The order in which the concluding words of each line rotate is fixed according to an intricate mathematical pattern. “Poetry and prime numbers have this in common,” concludes Tammet, “both are as unpredictable, difficult to define and multiple-meaning as life.”

Readers of Tammet’s autobiographies – which were bestsellers in the US and on the continent – continue to write to him. “They seek the same beauty and emotion that I find in both a poem and a prime number”, he writes. “What can I tell them?” Tammet, who knows that the circle that pi describes is perfect, belonging exclusively to the realm of imagination, has only one answer: “Imagine.”