Books: Daniel Tammet’s ‘Thinking in Numbers’ Dwells on a Pure Love

This is Daniel Tammet’s unlikely and delightful word choice in describing a conversation about numbers with a woman he was tutoring in mathematics.

His student was a homemaker whom he mistrusted at first because her motive for learning math was entirely pragmatic: she wanted to become an accountant. “There seemed to me something almost vulgar in the housewife’s sudden interest in numbers,” he writes, “as if she wanted to befriend them only as some people set out to befriend well-connected people.”

Then one day, teacher and student were discussing fractions, and what happens when a number is halved, then halved again. They expressed their shared amazement, “almost in the manner of gossip,” Mr. Tammet writes. “Then she came to a beautiful conclusion about fractions that I shall never forget. She said, ‘There is no such thing that half of it is nothing.’ ”

Mr. Tammet, whose previous books are “Born on a Blue Day” and “Embracing the Wide Sky,” is a “prodigious savant” — someone who combines developmental disabilities, in this case autism, with the skills of a prodigy. Happily, unlike many savants, he has a rare ability to describe what he sees in his head.

His new book is, in part, a description of an intimate relationship with numbers. Not uncommonly for people with autism, he has the remarkable condition called synesthesia, in which seemingly unrelated senses are combined — so that each number is accompanied by its own unique shape, color, texture and feel. The number 289 he finds hideous, while 333 is very appealing.

And pi is a thing of pure beauty. Its trillions upon trillions of digits speak to Mr. Tammet of “endless possibility, illimitable adventure.” (This is something we have been able to appreciate only in recent history: Archimedes knew pi to only three correct places, and Newton went only 13 places beyond that.)

For Mr. Tammet, the adventure culminated on March 14, 2004 — Pi Day, of course — when he recited pi from memory, to 22,514 places, over a period of five hours and nine minutes, to a packed room of spectators in Oxford, England.

His description of the shape and character the digits took as they rolled across his brain, past his tongue and out his mouth, is at once eerie and poetic. In the course of his recitation, he writes, the audience sat quietly, deeply moved.

Most of them, Mr. Tammet writes, “have no idea that the 10 digits they have just heard will eventually repeat an infinite number of times, have never thought of themselves as being in any way susceptible to math.” But “listening to the digits, they hear their dress sizes, their birthdays, their computer passwords. They hear excerpts — both shorter and longer — from a friend’s, or parent’s, or lover’s telephone number. Some lean forward in expectation. Patterns coalesce, and as quickly disperse, in their minds.”

As he recites, he tries to summon a “true picture” of what he is seeing and feeling, because he wants to convey the shape, colors and emotions to everyone in the hall. “I share my solitude with those who watch and listen to me. There is intimacy in my words.” He grows exhausted, and at one point, four hours into his recitation, his mind goes blank. He sees “maddening misty” colors, bulging and vibrating. But he refuses to panic, and after a few moments the next digit comes to him, tasting “even sweeter than the rest.”

Yet in “Thinking in Numbers” Mr. Tammet fails to sustain these revelatory glimpses into his highly unusual brain. Many of his connections between humanity, art, the brain and numbers are something of a stretch.

He writes, for instance, of the sestina, a poem of six stanzas of six lines each plus a final three-line stanza. The words that end each line of the first stanza are used to end the lines in each of the following five stanzas, rotated in a set pattern. (The final stanza must include all six words, two in each line.) A sestina is numerical by definition, but to suggest that it is beautiful as an end in itself would be like admiring a Beethoven sonata purely for its structure while ignoring the music.

Other tangents are simply off the point. Mr. Tammet says that Shakespeare was a pioneering thinker when it came to numbers, especially the idea of zero and its relationship to nothingness.

It is true that few things fascinated Shakespeare so much as the presence of absence, “the lacuna where there ought to be abundance — of will, or judgment or understanding,” Mr. Tammet writes. But was Shakespeare’s fascination really with numbers, or was it with the human condition? Most readers — casual and scholarly alike — would vote for the latter.

Still, “Thinking in Numbers” is an interesting collection of ideas, and worth reading if only for the suspenseful description of an extraordinary man in a room, conveying to a rapt audience his pure love of one very special string of digits as it stretches to infinity and beyond.

Katie Hafner is the author of the memoir “Mother Daughter Me,” among other books.

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