Making up Numbers : A History of Invention in Mathematics

Human beings have an innate need to make things up. People make up stories, nations make up histories, scientists make up theories to explain how the world works and philosophers ponder how we know things and how we should live and behave. These made-up tales often conflict with each other, but perhaps there is one thing on which we can all agree: that it is necessary to make up numbers to help us cope with life and with each other, from times when ‘one, two, many’ seemed to be enough, right down to the modern concepts of number used by scientists and mathematicians today. We might not always agree, nor even think about, what numbers are, but no-one is likely to deny that we need them