Engineer2Entrepreneur

The Universal History of Numbers : From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer

The Universal History of Numbers : From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer by Georges Ifrah

This is a book I read because I am trying to make a math curriculum for my daughter. I am not happy with how they are teaching math in school and many of the homeschool math books are not to fun either.

This is a deep and fairly heavy book and not really fun though it would be a great reference work to do that.

Now this book traces the deep origins of numbers: How various cultures counted using fingers and other parts of the body. The use of physical marks or markers for counting. Many cultures couldn't count past 3 or 4 and to do that they used a bowl of pebbles or tally sticks to keep track of the number of sheep and stuff. It is amazing that rural France still used tally sticks to track how much bread was delivered to each home and for balancing the books.

The most amazing part of the book is that he found that our "Arabic" number system isn't Arabic at all, rather it is from India. A major historical date is Monday 25 August 458 A.D. The exact date of the Lokavibhaga (The Parts of the Universe), the Jaina cosmological text; the oldest known Indian text to use zero and the place value system with word symbols. Obviously this is based on early uses of the number system but this is the earliest preserved work we have found. This is utterly fascinating.

The Indian number system slowly worked its way West into the Arab countries and eventually into Europe through Spain.

The best story is the Legend of Sessa, where the king wants to reward inventor of chess, who asks for 1 grain of wheat on the first square of the chessboard, 2 grains on the second, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth and so on. That sound innocuous enough at first but it gets completely out of hand halfway across the board. He would end up with 10^64 grains of wheat or enough to stretch the diameter of the orbit of the Earth around the Sun.

Another great story is that during the Renaissance multiplication and division were so hard it required traveling to Italian universities for what amounted to a Ph.D. to pull it off. The sad thing is that some schools are going back to those methods, throwing away hundreds of years of mathematical development.

There is a lot of heft to this book, so it is better to skimming over the massive evolutions of various number systems and skipping to the good stuff.

I rather liked it.

New Feature: Book Reviews

I am adding a new feature to this blog: Book reviews.

Not too long ago I posted an article onHow to Read a Book and Do It Quickly

Rather then a standard book review that you read in the paper, I'll be showing how to use the content reading techniques and also to use them as reminders later.

Let me know how you like this.

Book Review: The Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki

The big theme I saw was to keep things simple and easy. To make, to use, and to talk about. Get it out there fast and get feedback and start improving.

You need to not only improve your product but yourself as well. As you organization grows you will need different skills to deal with it.

Guy Kawasaki is very much into the Silicon Valley mode of thinking. That is not a surprise since he has been then pretty much from the beginning. It is very oriented toward venture capital funding and pitching to that crowd, even the bootstrapping section.

It's not a bad way even now, but it's not the only way, either. He's got a bunch of good nuggets though not a lot of depth.

Summary:

If you are thinking about starting a business this would give you some insights to start with. This is not a bad book at all though I was glad to have borrowed it out of the library rather then buying it.

Nuggets:

p3 Five Things an Entrepreneur must accomplish
1 Make Meaning
2 Make Mantra [an 8 word goal or mission statement]
3 Get Going [take action first]
4 Define your business model [where do you make money]
5 Weave a mat (milestones, assumptions, and tasks)
a Major milestones you need to meet
b Assumptions that are built into your business
c Tasks you need to accomplish to create an organization.

p6 If your organization never existed, the world would be worse off because... [Even fewer people would learn math and be able to leverage it's power.]

p8 Mantra [math is all around us] open your eyes math is all around us.

p16 business model
1 calc monthly operation costs
2 calc gross profit
3 divide step 1 by 2
4 ask a few women if you have a chance to sell that many.

Have some older (45+) people try using it, they will have problems that kids and teens won't, they also have different perspectives on its uses.

p29
"Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Wile E. Coyote...Genius. I am not selling anything, nor am I working my way through college, so let's get down to cases. You are a rabbit, and I am going to eat you for supper. Now, don't try to get away! I am more muscular, more cunning, faster and larger than you are...and I am a genius. Why, you could hardly pass the entrance examination to kindergarten. So. I'll give you the customary two minutes to say your prayers."
--The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979)

What's your mantra:
Eat you For Supper.
Quenches thirst.

p30
What do you do? KISS
Why the founders started the organization
Why customers should patronize it.
Why good people should work at it.

p35 picking a name
First initial early in the alphabet
Easy to spell and say
Avoid numbers
It should have verb potential "____ it."
Sound different from other companies/brands
Sound logical
Avoid the trendy

p37
Make it personal, not theoretical.
Speak English, not jargon
Apply the opposite test: Do you describe your offering in a way that is opposite to that of your competition?

p40 Everyone is in sales everyone should express the same message.

Chap 3
The art of pitching
What does your organization do? Answer that question in the first minute.
"So what?"
I do ___. For instance...

Presentation rules:
Ten slides
20 minutes
30 point font san serif
practice 25 times

p69 ten things to cover in a pitch
1 Title
2 Problem
3 Solution
4 Business model
5 Underlying magic
6 Marketing and sales
7 Competition
8 Management team
9 Financial projections and key metrics
10 Current status, accomplishments to date, timeline and use of funds.

Business plan rules
Same subjects as above more detail.
Limit to 20 pages
Only first 3 pages ever likely to be read

p92 bootstrapping
1 When is the product or service going to be ready for market?
2 What are your true, fully loaded costs of operations?
3 When will you run out of money?
4 How much of your sales pipeline is going to convert?
5 How much of your account receivables is collectible?
6 What can your competition's product do that yours can't?
7 Who are your non-performing employees?
8 Are you doing all you can to maximize shareholder value?
9 What is your organization doing to change the world and make meaning?
10 How good are you as the leader of the organization?

C9 The art of branding
Product
Place
Price
Promotion
Prayer/Proselytization

A good product at a good price that is easy to use and easy to talk about.

p187 designing T-shirts
Rather funny to have a minichapter on how to design a T-shirt.

p195 see the gorilla
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000A011D-C17F-101E-B40D83414B7F0000
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000506.html
Can you see past the end of your nose? -Mary Poppins
Just because you don't see someone using your product a certain way doesn't mean you should go out of your way to stop them. That usually means you have a new market to penetrate, and more easily too since you have some early adopters already.

C11 The Art of being a Mensch
Help many people
Do what's right
Pay back society
It seems rather sad that he feels the need to have such a chapter but given the history of capitalism lots of people seem to be operating in the Darwinian mode rather then the Christian mode.