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

  • Topological Limericks

    A mathematician confided That the Möbius strip is one-sided And you’ll get quite a laugh If you cut one in half For it stays in one piece, undivided! – Anonymous via @ColinTheMathmo   A…

  • Ugliness and masturbatory definitional runarounds

    If you haven’t read A Mathematician’s Lament, Paul Lockhart’s gloriously polemical assault on the confused heap of destructive disinformation known as “the mathematics curriculum” then I strongly encourage you to put that right. The…

  • An Idiotic Paradox

    A.   B-san, may I ask you a question? B.   Please do. A.   Thank you. Are you an idiot? B.   That question is hardly of the intellectual calibre that I have…

  • Webinar playback: some families of polyhedra

    On Saturday, I gave my first ever webinar, on the topic of “Some families of polyhedra”. And if you don’t know your tetrahemihexahedron from your tridiminished rhombicosidodecahedron, the good news is that the whole…

  • Science Media: The Next Generation

    Last week I travelled down to sunny Cambridge for the Science Media Next Generation conference at Jesus College. I’m not going to write up all that was said, since that has been done well…

  • Meet me in the aether

    This Saturday (14th May 2011) I shall be involved in my first ever webinar, generally chatting about my work and a few interesting bits of mathematics with Maria Droujkova, and anyone else who shows…

  • Superb at Nothing

    Having shamefully neglected this blog (and indeed having been enjoying a holiday in Hungary), I came back yesterday to find it overflowing with thousands of comments flogging fake Rolexes (or should that be Rolices?).…

  • One interview out of two

    I’m jabbering on here, in illustrious company, in a Maths Special edition of the Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast. I was recently also scheduled to host an online event over at Mathfuture, but regretfully postponed…

  • Book review: Naming Infinity

      Naming Infinity by Loren Graham & Jean-Michel Kantor tells the story of the beginnings of the mathematical subject called descriptive set theory. The backdrop to the story is the pioneering work performed by…