Alex's Adventures in Numberland - Alex Bellos [1]
GLOSSARY
APPENDICES
NOTES ON CHAPTERS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PICTURE CREDITS
Introduction
In the summer of 1992 I was working as a cub reporter at the Evening Argus in Brighton. My days were spent watching recidivist teenagers appear at the local magistrates court, interviewing shopkeepers about the recession and, twice a week, updating the opening hours of the Bluebell Railway for the paper’s listings page. It wasn’t a great time if you were a petty thief, or a shopkeeper, but for me it was a happy period in my life.
John Major had recently been re-elected as prime minister and, flush from victory, he delivered one of his most remembered (and ridiculed) policy initiatives. With presidential seriousness, he announced the creation of a telephone hotline for information about traffic cones – a banal proposal dressed up as if the future of the world depended on it.
In Brighton, however, cones were big news. You couldn’t drive into town without getting stuck in roadworksThe main route from London – the A23 (M) – was a corridor of striped orange cones all the way from Crawley to Preston Park. With its tongue firmly in its cheek, the Argus challenged its readers to guess the number of cones that lined the many miles of the A23 (M). Senior staff congratulated themselves on such a brilliant idea. The village fête-style challenge explained the story while also poking fun at central government: perfect local-paper stuff.
Yet only a few hours after the competition was launched, the first entry was received, and in it the reader had guessed the correct number of cones. I remember the senior editors sitting in dejected silence in the newsroom, as if an important local councillor had just died. They had aimed to parody the prime minister, but it was they who had been made to look like fools.
The editors had assumed that guessing how many cones there were on 20 or so miles of motorway was an impossible task. It self-evidently wasn’t and I think I was the only person in the building who could see why. Assuming that cones are positioned at identical intervals, all you need to do is make one calculation:
Number of cones = length of road ÷ distance between cones
The length of road can be measured by driving down it or by reading a map. To calculate the distance between cones you just need a tape measure. Even though the space between cones may vary a little, and the estimated length of road may also be subject to error, over large distances the accuracy of this calculation is good enough for the purposes of winning competitions in local papers (and was presumably exactly how the traffic police had counted the cones in the first place when they supplied the Argus with the right answer).
I remember this incident very clearly because it was the first moment in my career as a journalist that I realized the value of having a mathematical mind. It was also disquieting to realize just how innumerate most journalists are. There was nothing very complicated about finding out how many cones were lined alongside a road, yet for my colleagues the calculation was a step too far.
Two years previously I had graduated in mathematics and philosophy, a degree with one foot in science and the other in the liberal arts. Entering journalism was a decision, at least superficially, to abandon the former and embrace the latter. I left the Argus shortly after the cones fiasco, moving to work on papers in London. Eventually, I became a foreign correspondent in Rio de Janeiro. Occasionally my heightened aptitude for numbers was helpful, such as when finding the European country whose area was closest to the most recently deforested swathe of Amazon jungle, or when calculating exchange rates during various currency crises. But essentially, it felt very much as if I had left maths behind.
Then, a few years ago, I came back to the UK not knowing what I wanted to do next. I sold T-shirts of Brazilian