Monday, April 21, 2025

Book Note: Much Ado About Numbers

Eastaway, Rob. Much Ado About Numbers. The Experiment, 2024

I received this book for Christmas, and I read it almost immediately. In addition to indicating how far behind I am in my Book Notes, that also indicates the book's staying power—it remains clear in my memory even after so many months.

The book contains examples of how Shakespeare uses numbers, and that's interesting enough, but of particular interest to me was how maths was developing under Shakespeare's very eyes.

For example, here's an exploration of how the digit "cypher" (we might call it "zero") was coming into use in Europe during Shakespeare's life:




I also found a couple of charts in the book very useful. Here are the relative values of coins mentioned in Shakespeare's works:


And here's something I made a stab at (and then abandoned as being hopelessly complicated and uncertain) in my graduate student days: 


I'm a Shakespeare fan, not a mathematician, but the mathematical concepts and the Shakespeare were very well presented. Whichever way your interests lie (or if, like ShakespeareGeek, they lie in both camps), this book will be fascinating and valuable to you.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest