Millions Billions Zillions: Defending Yourself in a World of Too Many Numbers

READERS OF A CERTAIN age and ancestry may remember when the word “billion” meant something different by an order of magnitude depending on whether it was a British one or an American one.

Apparently, these days they are the same thing – a thousand million, the US position – but dim memories or simple uncertainty regarding the current status of very big numbers don’t assist in making reading this slim volume an undiluted exercise in joy.

And that’s a pity, because it could use a bit of help. Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and a prolific author. Sadly, though, his previous works have titles such as

Software Tools in Pascal and The Unix Programming Environment, which may give the astute reader a clue about the contents of this one.

In pointing out that big numbers are different – beyond our ability to derive an immediate, intuitive meaning for them – he makes a valuable observation. Much of his approach to changing that understanding, however, constitutes lifting items from newspaper articles in which the journalist got a figure wrong, usually by a big margin.

Thus, articles which should have quoted trillions in fact used the term billions, and those that should have dealt in billions instead cited millions – meaning consequent figures were wrong by a factor of a thousand.

And that’s worth pointing out, because sloppy research and sloppy editing help no one. But Kernighan uses the approach over and over, creating a repetitive narration that loses its gloss quite quickly. Demonstration becomes drone.

The school-bookish structure of the work, too, does it no favours. A volume on the intricacies of computer programming may well benefit from each short chapter concluding in a section labelled “Summary”, but in a collection of pieces ostensibly aimed at grownup general readers it comes across as clumsy and condescending.

All this is a shame, really, because a cracking read on how to navigate mathematical terms and functions, especially in relation to how they are bandied about in politics and policy, often with intent to deceive, would be really valuable.

Thankfully, thus, way back in 1995, John Allen Paulos, from Temple University in Philadelphia, wrote a book called A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper (Penguin). Go get it. Its references are dated, but its substance is brill.