Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7

Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7

Elwes, Richard

Hardcover

General MathematicsLogic

Publisher Price: $32.00

ISBN10: 1541605926
ISBN13: 9781541605923
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: Apr 28 2026
Pages: 368
Weight: 1.20
Height: 1.40 Width: 6.30 Depth: 9.30
Language: English
How humanity's long pursuit of ever-larger numbers broke the boundaries of mathematics and propelled us into the Information Age

A charming tour--Jordan Ellenburg, author of Shape

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? If you were doing math in ancient Egypt, those were the rules: anything bigger broke math.

As mathematician Richard Elwes shows in Huge Numbers, this is the strange story of math. Even today, writing down some numbers is beyond us: try it with all the zeroes in a googolplex, or an outrageous alien number like TREE(3). Safer not to try: even harnessing every particle in the universe, you wouldn't come close. But this book is no mere bestiary of numerical monsters. It shows how, by hunting down and studying ever-bigger numbers, arithmetic has reshaped human thought and made our modern era of science and computation possible.

Where many math books celebrate abstract algebra or ineffable infinities, Huge Numbers is both more practical and far weirder. It reveals a world where most numbers remain out of reach until we discover how to chase them down and tame them, and so remake our world again.

Also in

General Mathematics

View All