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Alex Bellos – The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book

By Katie Steckles. Posted December 1, 2020



If you’re a fan of maths (which we assume you are, if you’re reading a maths blog), you might be familiar with Alex Bellos from his excellent popular maths books, including Alex’s Adventures in Numberland and the follow-up Alex Through The Looking Glass; you might also enjoy his more recent forays into puzzle books, including Can You Solve My Problems, and Japanese logic puzzle collection Puzzle Ninja, as well as his regular Monday puzzle column in The Guardian.

For his latest book, The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book, Alex has focused on language puzzles, largely drawn from the linguistic equivalent of Maths Olympiads (which he’s gotten really into lately). It’s a hefty volume split into cleverly collected sections on different aspects of language – including how languages are constructed, how words are pronounced, and as you might expect, the origins of how language is used to communicate numbers.

More and Less

By Paul Taylor. Posted July 11, 2012

I’m currently reading The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, presenter of Radio 4 maths show More or Less. It’s very good, but one thing is stopping me from giving it an unqualified recommendation: it’s full of passages like this:

[T]he government spends three hundred dollars per person (five times less than the British government and seven times less than the American government)

Because of its lousy education system, Cameroon is perhaps twice as poor as it could be.

The poorest tenth of the population spends almost seven times less on fuel than the richest tenth, as a percentage of their much smaller income.

Model for processing language in context

By Peter Rowlett. Posted June 6, 2012

New research looks at how language is used to convey information in context, something which is, according to its abstract “one of the most astonishing features of human language”. Apparently there have been “many” theories providing “informal accounts of communicative inference” but few have succeeded in making “precise, quantitative predictions about pragmatic reasoning”.