The Universe and The Teacup The Universe and the Teacup is a pretty interesting book with one purpose: To make math seem relevant and cool to people who have decided that they don’t like math. C. Cole pushes this idea by explaining how math applies to every imaginable thing in the universe, and how mathematicians are, in a sense, scientists. She also uses quotes to promote the coolness of math: “Understanding is a lot like sex,” states the first line of the book. This rather blunt analogy, as well as the passage that explains how bubbles meet at 120-degree angles, supports Cole’s theory that math can be applied to any subject. This approach of looking at commonplace objects and activities in a new way in order to associate them with math makes Cole’s comparison of mathematicians with scientists easier to understand. It requires one to look at mathematicians not just as people who know lots of facts and formulas, but rather as curious people who use these formulas to understand the world around them.Chapter two of The Universe and the Teacup deals with exponential numbers. More precisely, it deals with the difficulty humans have in processing very large and very small numbers. The term the book uses to describe this difficulty is “number numbness.”This numbness is natural, stemming from the fact that humans simply do not deal with such numbers very often, and even when they are dealt with, they are seen as words, not rational concepts. The fact that absolutely everyone suffers from this difficulty could prove to be harmful in the future, as population grows at the seemingly infinitesimal rate of 2% per year, an amount that is actually quite large when the current number of people on Earth is taken into account. The many examples Cole uses in this chapter serve to prove one point: Because our daily life does not require us to deal with them, we have very little true concept of...
