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Books

Number: The Language of Science

Tobias Dantzig

Recommended by 1 person on the record.

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 6d is days, 4yr is years.

Cal Newport liked it
Though the book perhaps gets a little too math-ey by the end (and this is coming from someone who is literally teaching discrete mathematics to university students at the moment), Dantzig provides a compelling overview of what we mean when we talk about "numbers," and why this is a question that we must repeatedly keep re-visiting.

on calnewport.com · 3 Dec 2021

This book on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.