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Huge Numbers
A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7
Contributors
Formats and Prices
- On Sale
- Apr 28, 2026
- Page Count
- 368 pages
- Publisher
- Basic Books
- ISBN-13
- 9781541605947
Price
$19.99Price
$25.99 CADFormat
Format:
- ebook $19.99 $25.99 CAD
- Hardcover $32.00 $42.00 CAD
- Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $31.99
Preorder from Retailers:
“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.
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“A charming tour through the realm of the very, very, very numerous, from the ancient world through the distant future.”Jordan Ellenberg, author of Shape
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“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
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“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, computer scientist and author of "Who Can Name The Bigger Number?"
