Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously

Richard Elwes

'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.