GEORGES IFRAH, now aged fifty, was the despair of his maths teachers at school - he lingered near the bottom of the class. Nevertheless he grew up to become a maths teacher himself and, in order to answer a pupil's question as to where numbers came from, he devoted some ten years to travelling the world in search of the answers, earning his keep as a night clerk, waiter, taxi-driver. Today he is a maths encyclopaedia on two legs, and his book has been translated into fourteen languages.

DAVID BELLOS is Professor of French at Princeton University and author of Georges Perec: A Life in Words. E. F. HARDING has taught at Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Cambridge and is a Derector of the Statistical Advisory Unit at Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. SOPHIE WOOD is a specialist in technical translation from French and Spanish. IAN MONK, while skilled in technical translation, is better known for his translations of Georges Perec and Daniel Pennac.

The main aim of this two-volume work is to provide in simple and accessible terms the full and complete answer to all and any questions that anyone might want to ask about the history of numbers and of counting, from prehistory to the age of computers.

More than ten years ago, an American translation of the predecessor of The Universal History of Numbers appeared under the title From One to Zero, translated by Lowell Bair (Viking, 1985). The present book - translated afresh - is many times larger, and seeks not only to provide a historical narrative, but also, and most importantly, to serve as a comprehensive, thematic encyclopaedia of numbers and counting. It can be read as a whole, of course; but it can also be consulted as a source-book on general topics (for example, the Maya, the numbers of Ancient Egypt, Arabic counting, or Greek acrophonics) and on quite specific problems (the proper names of the nine mediaeval apices, the role of Gerbert of Aurillac, how to do a long division on a dust-abacus, and so on).

Two maps are provided in this first volume to help the reader find what he or hse might want to know. The Summary Table of Contents above gives a general overview. The Index of names and subjects, from p. 616, provides a ore detailed map to this volume.

The bibliography has been divided into two sections: sources available in English; and other sources. In the text, references to works listed in the bibliography give just the auther name and the date of publication, to avoid unnecessary repetition. Abbreviations used in the text, in the captions to the many illustrations, and in the bibliography of this volume are explained below.