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

  • Euler’s Partition Theorem

    I’ve recently been revisiting Euler’s Theorem. Not that one. No, not the one on this commemorative stamp either. No, no, not the totient function one. (Good guess though.) I mean the one about partitions.…

  • Math Frolicking

    As an ambitious young researcher, you can miss the wood for the trees. When you’re presented with a theorem, your inclination is to dive straight into the proof, and start grappling with the toughest…

  • Dr Who and the Quaternions

    “The parametric engines are jammed! Orthogonal vector’s gone! I’m almost out of ideas!” I have a guest post at The Aperiodical reporting on the London Mathematical Society’s birthday party last week, where Doctor Who…

  • The Grothendieck Song

    There are many songs in the world about love and loss, heartbreak and heart-ache. There are altogether fewer about algebraic geometry in the style of Alexander Grothendieck. Here is my attempt to fill that…

  • Points and lines

    Last week, we Leeds mathematicians were treated to a talk by Professor Green Professor Green with the delightfully elementary title of Points and Lines. It reported on joint work of Ben Green and Terence…

  • Lecture: Gödel, Incompleteness & Unprovable Theorems

    If you’ve got a spare hour[1] at some stage here is a video of a talk I gave last month on Gödel, Incompleteness & Unprovable Theorems. [1] The joy of the pause button is…

  • Faro Shuffles

    If you shuffle a deck of cards perfectly eight times, you get back exactly to where you started. Here’s a video of the magician Adam West doing it: In this post, we’ll see why…

  • Total Numbers of Permutations

    I’m teaching a third year Combinatorics module this term, which has led me to revisit some old friends: permutations and combinations. I thought I knew them well, but have already learned something new! First…

  • Infinite Series – A Health and Safety Warning

    There’s been a bit of a rumpus recently about this video from Numberphile which purports to show that It got posted on Slate with an accompanying blogpost by Phil Plait, which then got shot…