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The Irrationals: A
Story of the Numbers
You Can’t Count On
by Julian Havil
PRINCETON AND OXFORD: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2012, 298 PP.,
ISBN 978-0-691-14342-2
REVIEWED BY PAMELA GORKIN
ulian Havil’s book, The Irrationals: A Story of the Numbers
J You Can’t Count On, is the story of the irrationals—
beginning in Greece and ending with why all this matters.
Havil’s narrative style is demanding and packed with details,
both historical and mathematical, but mathematicians and
serious students of mathematics will find much to admire in
this book. Using the important players, ideas, and proofs
associated with this history, the author shows us that ‘‘First
proofs are often mirror shy...but they should also not be lost.’’
The author studies the history of the irrationals, from
their birth in Greece, to India and Arabia, to Fibonacci, and
on to the 15th and 16th centuries, where we meet the
German algebraist and Augustinian monk Michael Stifel.
We move to the 17th century with a discussion of the work
of Fermat and Descartes, and on to John Wallis and a
promise to discuss the irrationality of p. At this point, the
author presents the first version of several proofs as well as
some more attractive later versions. ‘‘Mathematical con-
stants,’’ we learn, ‘‘are either anonymous or famous, with
fame a reflection of the constant’s importance. And we can
distinguish between those numbers for which fame is an
intrinsic quality and those which pffiffiffi have had it thrust upon
them: p and e, compared with 2, for example.’’ And so it
is that the reader will learn more about these irrational
constants and many others. We begin with e.
We first see Euler’s proof, using continued fractions, that e
is irrational. We learn that an understanding of the simple
continued p fraction
ffiffiffi form of numbers allowed Euler to prove
that e and e are irrational, but the continued fraction form
of p did not suggest a proof of its irrationality. Instead, this
was proven by Lambert, using the series expansion for tan x.
The second proof of the irrationality of e is the one with
which most mathematicians are familiar and it belongs to
Fourier. This is the standard series proof of the irrationality
of e and can be used to establish the irrationality of e 2 . One
very nice feature of this book is the inclusion of things that
are not yet known: ‘‘The appearance of e as an infinite
series has allowed a simple and effective argument to be
put to establish its irrationality (as well as that of e 2 (the
arguments can be further extended too)) and there are
myriad other provably irrational constants defined by infi-
nite series, but the reader should curb any optimism that a
series necessarily leads to a proof of irrationality. Taking
three examples (of many), the nature of the following
numbers remains a mystery:’’
1 X1
ð1Þk1
; the Catalan constant G ¼ 2;
k¼0
k! þ 1 k¼1 ð2k  1Þ
and the Euler-Mascheroni constant
X
n
!
1
lim
n!1
k¼1
k
 ln n :
The nature of many other numbers remains unknown as
well: p þ e, pe, e e, and pe, to name just a few.
Having discussed and presented a proof of the irratio-
nality of e, the author moves to Hermite and p. This is not
easy reading, but it is interesting reading—as long as the
reader has the appropriate background. Even Niven’s
‘‘simple’’ proof that p is irrational requires significant
background in differential and integral calculus. The author
takes us from items of general interest to a more in-depth
look at those items. For example, before turning to a very
special irrational number (more on that later), this chapter
concludes with a look at John H. Conway’s Look and Say
Sequences, for instance,
1; 11; 21; 1211; 111221; 312211; . . .;
(look at it and say it) and Conway’s analysis of such
sequences, which is much deeper.
We return to the aforementioned very special irrational:
fð3Þ, where f represents, of course, the Zeta function,
definedP here only for positive integers k [ 1 as
fðkÞ ¼ 1 1
n¼1 nk . The point of this chapter is not to prove
what happens when k ¼ 1 or to concentrate on Euler’s
proof that fð2Þ ¼ p2 =6; instead, the main goal of this
chapter is to present Roger Apéry’s surprising result that
fð3Þ is irrational. In the author’s words, ‘‘The sole purpose
of this chapter is to address Apéry’s original argument, if
not in full then nearly so, in the hope that his fantastic
insights might at least be seen to combine to an implausible
solution of a seemingly innocent problem; what we cannot
hope to do is make his arguments natural.’’ Directions
leading to Apéry’s tomb and its inscription,
1 1 p
1 þ þ þ    6¼ ;
8 27 q
are provided in an appendix; his tomb (as well as those of
many other well-known people, including Delambre,
Fourier, Germain, Laplace, and The Doors lead singer, Jim
Morrison) can be found in Père Lachaise, a famous ceme-
tery located in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. (Hot tip:
Take Havil’s directions. The cemetery layout is incredibly
confusing.)
What follows is a chapter entitled, ‘‘From the Rational to
the Transcendental,’’ which is concerned with a close look
at Diophantine approximation, the approximation of irra-
tional numbers by rationals. Of course every real number
can be approximated by a rational number, but how good
is that approximation? The author considers both the his-
tory and theory of Diophantine approximation. In
this chapter, we are introduced to Dirichlet and his
Schubfachprinzip (Pigeonhole principle or Dirichlet’s
drawer principle), which is, as the author notes, a
Ó 2015 Springer Science+Business Media New York
DOI 10.1007/s00283-014-9528-3
deceptively simple yet remarkably powerful result. As the
title of the chapter suggests, this leads naturally to a dis-
cussion of the transcendental numbers and, in particular,
the transcendental nature of p and e, as well as Liouville’s
construction of transcendental numbers.
Moving from Liouville to Hermite and e, on to Linde-
mann and p, and finally to Cantor’s proof that there are
more transcendental numbers than algebraic, the author
eventually returns to continued fractions and, after a
lengthy discussion of what randomness should be, dis-
cusses the randomness of the decimal expansion of an
irrational number.
Although Havil does not include all details in his argu-
ments, he does include a lot of details. And, as many of the
earlier quotes indicate, the writing is not simple. This is not,
as the book claims, appropriate both for the reader ‘‘who is
comfortable with real-variable calculus and its associated
THE MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCER
limits and series...but also to those whose mathematical
training is less but whose curiosity and enthusiasm is
great...’’ It is appropriate only for the former; without
knowledge of series, integral calculus, and limits, the
reader would wander aimlessly from chapter to chapter.
However, packed with results from Mathematics Maga-
zine, The American Mathematical Monthly, and The
Mathematical Intelligencer, every mathematician and stu-
dent of mathematics with appropriate background will find
this book to be a valuable resource.
Department of Mathematics
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, PA 17837
USA
e-mail: pgorkin@bucknell.edu