Our fascination with numbers begins when we are children and continues
throughout our lives. We start counting our fingers and toes and end up
balancing checkbooks and calculating risk. So powerful is the appeal of
numbers that many people ascribe to them a mystical significance. Other
numbers go beyond the supernatural, working to explain our universe and
how it behaves. In Cosmic Numbers, mathematics professor James D. Stein
traces the discovery, evolution, and interrelationships of the numbers
that define our world. Everyone knows about the speed of light and
absolute zero, but numbers like Boltzmann.s constant and the Chandrasekhar
limit are not as well known, and they do far more than one might imagine:
They tell us how this world began and what the future holds. Much more
than a gee-whiz collection of facts and figures, Cosmic Numbers
illuminates why particular numbers are so importantboth to the scientist
and to the rest of us.

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