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

  • You are now about to witness the strength of math knowledge.

    [Update: I’m updating this post with more math raps as I find them, so scroll to the bottom for newer material.] I can see the future. And what I see is math-rapping. So here’s…

  • Exotic spheres and Yog-Sothothery

    I’ve got an article about the smooth 4-dimensional Poincaré conjecture, and Yog-Sothoth, over at Plus magazine.

  • Little Atoms

    I was recently interviewed by Neil Denny on Little Atoms. You can hear the result here.

  • One hell of a relationship

    Two great mathematicians of the 20th century, Pavel Alexandrov and Andrey Kolmogorov, were the closest of friends. They were almost certainly more than that too, although we cannot be sure. Understandably, they guarded their…

  • No more news

    Everyone knows that what appears in the news is rarely the most important information about that world on that day. But why not? One issue which is often discussed is sensationalism. By having racier,…

  • In the name of Gauss

    Dick Lipton has an interesting post about the history of mathematical notation, and how it affects the thinking of those who use it. During the discussion he references a mathematician I had never heard…

  • Punk Math

    I just ran into Tom Henderson’s Punk Math Manifesto: The video’s an appeal for funds taken from Kickstarter, but it looks like the target’s already been reached. (Not that a few more pennies would…

  • Bad Packer

    Circle packing is a classical topic in discrete geometry. As Axel Thue and László Fejes Tóth showed, if you want to fit as many identical circular coins on a table as possible (all sitting…

  • Blog and book updates

    I’ve been doing some updates around this place. If things look rickety it’s because I am now phping and htmling myself. I’m having fun with it, but if I’m honest I don’t really know…