The Magic and Mystery of Numbers Quotes

“Chinese mathematicians before our era calculated rapidly with bamboo counting rods, using red rods for positive numbers (cheng) and black rods for negative numbers (fu).”
― Scientific American Editors, The Magic and Mystery of Numbers

“A ghost cow has at least some kind of reality, but a negative cow is less real than no cow. A cow from a cow leaves nothing, but adding a negative cow to a positive cow, causing both to vanish like a particle meeting its antiparticle,”
― Scientific American Editors, The Magic and Mystery of Numbers