Looking at Numbers

Numbers are part of nature. Observing them, looking at them, thinking about them, is a way of understanding our relationship to nature. But when we do this in a technical professional way, we sometimes overlook the basic appearances, the things we can understand by simply looking at numbers. Everyone talks about the beauty of mathematics, but almost no one observes that this beauty is largely a result of the symmetries that emerge from simple combinations of natural numbers. One sees this clearly in Looking at Numbers.