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Imagine if the biggest number you had a symbol for was 1,000,000. In ancient Egypt, anything bigger broke maths.
Still today, writing down some numbers is beyond us: try it with all the zeroes in a googolplex, or an outrageous alien number like TREE. 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 Richard Elwes shows how counting larger and larger numbers has shaped human thought. Whether they are recorded with notches carved on a tally stick, beads on an abacus, or electrical signals carrying binary code, numbers are endlessly expressive and versatile. This rich vocabulary allows us to test the limits of mathematics over and over, breaking it down and putting it back together again.
Taking us on a tour that spans continents and millennia, from the Mayan calendar to today’s chatbots, Richard Elwes reveals that huge numbers are everywhere, if you know where to look. Discover how they have expanded our horizons and powered our modern world.
Author Biography
Richard Elwes is a senior lecturer at the University of Leeds and a Holgate Session Leader for the London Mathematical Society. He writes for New Scientist and recently joined the crew at Numberphile, presenting episodes about the very largest numbers in modern mathematics.
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