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Essay about The Man Who Counted

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After reading the book The Man Who Counted by Malba Tahan, I learned a lot more about mathematics and how it can be viewed as an art form. The two main characters, Hanak Tade Maia, the man that became friends with the man who counted, and Beremiz Samir, the counting man, talk about their adventures and their jobs they both get with royalty. The book is basically filled with the stories and adventures of the Counting Man told by him and what Maia views. The book is told in sequential order starting from a memory of how Maia and Beremiz met, which was when Maia found him dressed in rags on the side of the road in the desert blurting out random seven digit numbers. This book was very well written and interesting enough to keep the reader’s …show more content…

I already have told a lot of my friends about this book because even though it’s a bit confusing, it’s also fascinating to think that someone like this young man (who is only 26 years old) can be so phenomenal when it comes it math. He really sparked and kept my interest, I think that I was most intrigued by the authors writing style. This book made me see math more as a subject that one could actually look into more than just numbers, I can see the actual attractiveness to mathematics because of the stories that were told throughout this novel. When it comes to this book, I didn’t think I could learn much from a fictional novel. I did find out that even though this book was fictional, I learned a great deal. I learned to appreciate math as an art form, and how number correlations are so fascinating. The counting man shows the reader what “perfect numbers” are, how to get the perfect correlation, and why he is so good at math. At one point, the counting man estimated the amount of birds in a giant bird cage, correctly to come out at some absurd number of 500 and something. After being told to tell his employer how many birds there were in the cage, which he did without any trouble at all, the counting man convinced his employer to set them free because than their numbers will soar. He meant literally and figuratively, literally because the birds will soar, and figuratively because than they will be free to mate and have spawn so their

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