Preface
The November Statement
My first glimpse into mathematics, as opposed to arithmetic, came on a
Saturday afternoon in late fall when I was about seven years old. I wanted
to go out and toss a football around with my father. My father, however,
had other ideas.
For as long as I can remember, my father always kept a meticulous
record of his monthly expenses on a large yellow sheet that, in retrospect,
was a precursor of an Excel spreadsheet. One yellow sheet sufficed for
each month; at the top, my father wrote the month and year, and the rest
of the sheet was devoted to income and expenses. On this particular fall
day, the sheet had failed to balance by 36 cents, and my father wanted to
find the discrepancy.
I asked him how long it would take, and he said he didn’t think it would
take too long, because errors that were divisible by 9 were usually the re-
sult of writing numbers down in the wrong order; writing 84 instead of
4 8; 84 48 36. He said this always happened; whenever you wrote down