Coming soon:
Huge Numbers

Basic Books, April 2026

“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

“A charming tour through the realm of the very, very, very numerous, from the ancient world through the distant future.” 

– Jordan Ellenberg

“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

Dr Richard Elwes is a writer and Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Leeds in the UK.

YouTube playlist of Richard on Numberphile.

Blog Archive

  • A Carnival Atmosphere

    The Carnival of Mathematics is a fortnightly round-up of maths blogging, which has just reached its 50th incarnation. It’s a travelling show, and is currently docked at The Endeavour. Have a look, there’s some…

  • Passing Platonic Solids

    I hope everyone knows that the only regular convex solids are the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron: the Platonic solids. These are the only 3-dimensional solid shapes built from straight lines and flat…

  • Happy Birthday Charlie

    It’s 200 years since the origin of Charles Darwin! Without his (and admittedly others’) imagination we would still have no idea why narwhal have horns, or what happens when dung beetles lose their taste…

  • Sketches of topology

    Whenever I’ve met low-dimensional topologists I’ve been dazzled by the effortless way these experts can mentally manipulate the subtlest of geometric configurations. Twisting and pulling manifolds about, and sewing in projective spaces all over…

  • The sine of the beast

    Two things (one interesting, one very silly) that I have recently learnt about the sine function: 1. The sine rule, as most school-students know, says that in any triangle, is constant, whichever side A…

  • Save the LMS?

    The London Mathematical Society is a small but important institution which operates out of De Morgan House in London. It publishes a few (very high quality) books and journals, organises and supports conferences and…

  • He who isn’t Shaw

    Everyone is familiar with George Bernard Shaw’s line: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” Apparently it isn’t universally popular in educational circles. But what did Shaw actually mean? I’d always taken it…

  • Knots and algorithms

    The best-known techniques for telling knots apart are with knot invariants. These are algebraic objects (e.g polynomials) associated to knots. If two knots have different invariants, then you know they really are different knots…

  • Gorgeous Möbius

    A short film about Möbius transformations, by Douglas Arnold and Jonathan Rogness. The music is Schumann’s “Of Foreign Lands and Peoples”, played by Donald Betts.