Like Hansel and Gretel who left a trail of bread crumbs to find their way home, when I travel I usually take along a book-bag and leave behind a trail of books because I've found that books are the perfect present for people who have no access to them in remote and far-off places.
Reading "The Parrot's Theorem" reminds me of the time I left a copy of "Sophie's World" with an Austrian who'd made his home on a tiny island in Tonga. Just as "The Parrot's Theorem" amuses and teases the curious but unlearned reader to give him (or her) a better understanding of mathematics, so "Sophie's World" gave my Austrian friend his first glimpse of philosophy and his world has been enlarged by it since.
In "The Parrot's Theorem" Mr Ruche, an old man who owns a bookshop in Paris, receives a letter from a friend who's decided to send him his library which contains a ton of books on maths. The mystery behind those mathematics books and a talking parrot lead the characters in the story to start the mathematical journey from Thales to Pythagoras to Euclid to Hipparchus, Hypatia and Bhaskara, during which they learn about Fermat's Last Theorem, Fibonacci's numbers, Goldbach's conjecture, and π in the sky, and how to find X.
Right now I'm enjoying the journey too much but as soon as I've reached the epilogue, I shall parcel up the book and mail it to my Austrian friend so that next time someone tries to tell him about the guy who invented zero, he won't dismiss it with a "Thanks for nothing".
