This is a translation by Paul Broneer of the 1957 edition of Zahlwort und Ziffer, which originally appeared in 1934. It was published by the MIT Press in 1969 and taken over, unaltered, by Dover Publications in 1992.
Karl Menninger (1898–1963) spent his career, 1923–1963, as a teacher of mathematics in Heppenheim in southwestern Germany; the population in Menninger’s time was around 15,000. Number Words and Number Symbols is his monument. Other than that, he wrote a book translated into English (1965) as Calculator’s Cunning that had had ten German editions, and a work that appeared in English (1962) as Mathematics in Your World. They are trifles in comparison.
He should not to be confused with the American psychiatrist Karl Menninger (1893–1990). He was, of course. A copy of Number Words and Number Symbols was sent, because of the confusion, for review to the Journal of Analytical Psychology. The reviewer was sufficiently impressed to review it anyway, finding in it material useful for, or of interest to, analytical psychologists.
As might be expected, the book is about number words and number symbols. The table of contents shows what the author includes. He doesn’t leave much out! For example, there nine pages of tables of number words in Indo-European languages, from Sanskrit to Gothic, Tocharian, Old Church Slavonic, Breton, and even including French, German, and English.
The book is well illustrated with 282 figures. The writing is clear and lively. There are anecdotes. With good reason has it lasted eighty years. (There is no book like it because, if anyone ever had the idea of writing one, he or she would look at Menninger’s, see that it would be of no use and decide to write something else.)
The book is a marvel of scholarship. In his acknowledgments, Menninger gives special thanks to twenty-five separate libraries. All the others that he went to, the ones that deserve only ordinary thanks, don’t get mentioned.
It’s not a book to curl up with for leisure reading. It contains so much material that it’s difficult to digest big hunks of it all at once. Dipping into it at random is rewarding, and if you want to know about tally sticks, or quipu, or the abacus, this is the place to start.
The 1957 German edition was in two volumes. To fit the English edition into one volume, the references and bibliographies were left out. That’s too bad, but I suppose reasonable — most of the references would be in German, date to before 1934, and hence would not be very useful for monoglot English speakers in 2015.
One misprint (“Diphantus”, p. 272) has survived for eighty-one years, or from whenever it was introduced.
That aside, a wonderful book!
Woody Dudley stopped teaching in 2004, but he hasn’t stopped being fascinated with numbers.