From Zero to Infinity: A History of Numbers, Part 1

Sierpinski's Triangle

I saw that the library had one of the Teaching Company's DVD sets on math. These are rather pricy and though I'm interested in learning more about math in a casual way, I've never bought them. So I gave this a try.

In this program a professor from Williams College explains all sorts of cool and often esoteric facts and theories about math. I learned loads including:

• that some birds can count to as high as 4
• that some tribes can't count beyond 2 or 4
• what Canter Dust is
• that the Samarians used a base 60 system
• where the arithmetic signs came from
• that the probability of rolling a rational number if you keep rolling a 10 sided die is 0%

The professor is affable and makes the concepts clear. If you miss a point you can easily rewatch it or consult the accompanying. Each half hour program is rather dense so watching both discs (12 lessons) is 

The production values are rather low, but that's okay as long as I was learning. This DVD did make me wish that I had better high school math teachers or just one who'd let a video teach than doing it herself. Also, I wish we had courses like number theory offered. With this and shows like Numb3rswould have made me more well-rounded.

I would recommend that the library let patrons keep the DVDs for more than a week. I felt like I was cramming 8 weeks of instruction into 7 days. Not something that I'd encourage.