Coming Soon

By Richard Elwes

On Sale: Apr 28, 2026
Publisher: Hachette Audio
ISBN-13: 9781668657331

$27.99

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Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $27.99
ebook $19.99 $25.99 CAD
Hardcover $32.00 $42.00 CAD

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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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Richard Elwes

About the Author

Richard Okura Elwes is an associate professor at University of Leeds, and a Holgate Session Leader for the London Mathematical Society. He lives in Leeds, UK.

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About the Author Richard Okura Elwes is an associate professor at University of Leeds, and a Holgate Session Leader for the London Mathematical Society. He lives in Leeds, UK.

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Richard Elwes

About the Author