Last year, Steven Pinker rode bestseller lists with The Stuff of Thought, a rumination on how our minds and culture are shaped by language and words. Over the course of that entire text, he reduced the role of numbers to our ability to distinguish between “one, two and many.” However, numbers are symbols just like letters and words, and deserve greater attention. Andrew Hodges’s One to Nine: The Inner Life of Numbers attempts to shed a little more light on the impact of these abstractions and demonstrate how numbers are wedded delicately to our very lives.

In the study of language, two schools of thought dwell on the extent to which language is something socially constructed between speakers or hard-wired into the brain. That is, beneath the superficial differences of language rests the roots of a basic universal language. Philosophically, mathematics is no different — either mathematics is socially created or it is not, but unlike the story of language, the stakes with math are a little higher. Proponents of the “more than just a man-made tool” school, such as Hodges, can be traced back to the likes of Plato and Pythagoras, who argued that mathematics is in fact the secret language of the universe — the handwriting of the supreme being, as it were, though Hodges himself doesn’t take this position.

Stopping short of a full explanation is in fact the chief drawback of One to Nine, and much of it is likely due to Hodges’s attempt to strike a balance in readership. While he has an easy style that makes much use of Sudoku metaphors, and easily scans over theories of music and social relationships, he never quite provides the reader with a full enough account to appreciate what he is describing, whether it is harmonics, plastic numbers or the genius of Alan Turing, considered by many to have created the field of computer science. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of words to explain a grand unifying theory of everything, and Hodges’s book could easily have included 150 pages of extra information.

For anyone intrigued by the recent attention given to the famed Fibonacci numbers, or the mysteries of pi, One to Nine will prove to be an enjoyable introduction to the deeper side of math. Unfortunately, its pages don’t offer a full solution.