Description

‘Fascinating and immensely readable’ Ian Stewart

‘A charming tour through the realm of the very, very, very numerous, from the ancient world through to the distant future’ Jordan Ellenberg, author of How Not to Be Wrong

What if, every time you wanted to write down 1,000,000, you had to draw a picture of a god? And what if that number were the biggest you had a symbol for? In ancient Egypt, those were the rules: anything bigger broke maths.

Writing down some numbers is still beyond us today: try it with all the zeroes in a googolplex, or an outrageous alien number like FISH 7. Even harnessing every particle in the universe, you wouldn’t come close. But that hasn’t stopped us from hunting down these mind-bendingly big numbers and studying them.

In Huge Numbers, mathematician and Numberphile presenter Richard Elwes shows how counting has shaped human thought. Whether recorded with notches carved on a tally stick, beads on an abacus, or electrical signals carrying binary code, it allows us to test the limits of mathematics over and over, breaking it down and putting it back together again.

Come on a fascinating tour that spans continents and millennia, from the Mayan calendar to today’s chatbots. You’ll see that huge numbers are everywhere, expanding our horizons and powering our modern world.

Publisher Review

A charming tour through the realm of the very, very, very numerous, from the ancient world through to the distant future — Jordan Ellenberg, author of HOW NOT TO BE WRONG Humanity has always been entranced by big numbers – the bigger the better. This fascinating exploration of the giants of the mathematical world is clear, informative, and immensely readable. Wonderful! — Ian Stewart, author of IN PURSUIT OF THE UNKNOWN Elwes provides a phenomenal scenic tour of googology (the study of huge numbers), covering everything from ancient Mayan and Babylonian numeral systems to the scale of the universe to the dizzyingly fast-growing functions of mathematical logic. I wish I had written this book — Scott Aaronson, author of WHO CAN NAME THE BIGGER NUMBER PRAISE FOR RICHARD ELWES * – * Fascinating! A brilliantly conceived book on the history, working and going-ons of mathematics . . . get a copy and become the maths boffin your teacher always wished you were * Vision Magazine * Elwes takes the key concepts, perfectly illustrates them with practical examples and easy-to-follow explanations, and applies the principles to everyday situations. The effect is strangely liberating, and you might soon find yourself acquiring a love of logarithms and a respect for reflex quadrilaterals * Good Book Guide *