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

  • Concrete Incompleteness 1

    I’ve just uploaded the slides [pdf] from a talk I gave yesterday at the University of Leeds, about concrete incompleteness. The topic is the same as my recent New Scientist article, but in greater…

  • Benoît Mandelbrot

    The internet is currently full of beautiful fractals, a firework display in honour of Benoît Mandelbrot who died yesterday. I was pleased to see that he even made the front page of the BBC…

  • Well Done Simon!

    Simon Singh has won his appeal against the British Chiropractic Association, who sued him for libel after he wrote that the BCA “happily promotes bogus treatments”. The appeal court has decided that this is…

  • Curved Spaces

    I’m currently having terrific fun playing around on Jeff Weeks’ flight simulator, Curved Spaces. Unlike most flight-simulators, the action takes place not in regular Euclidean space, but in a selection of 3-manifolds. (It’s also…

  • Dark Matter Madness

    There have been wild rumours flying around the web about an exciting finding at the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search. Dark matter is a (still!) hypothetical invisible substance, which accounts for the universe behaving as…

  • The Frivolous Theorem of Arithmetic

    It’s a new one on me, but I like it: Almost all natural numbers are very, very, very large. We could extend it by saying that for any n, almost all natural numbers are…

  • Platonic Toys

    …in which I showcase the talents of my wife. [Post updated: see here for a photo of some Platonic solid toys made by my wife (along with some babies, also made by her). Next…

  • Dürer, rhinos, and snowflakes

    I’ve been a fan of the 16th century German artist Albrecht Dürer ever since I saw his print of a rhinoceros. It was put together from descriptions and someone else’s sketch: he never saw…

  • Talking knot-sense

    A couple of weeks ago Matt Daws and I gave a masterclass on knot theory as part of this year’s Leeds Festival of Science [pdf]. Many thanks go to Ruth Holland and Hazel Kendrick…