Playing With Numbers

Two authors who are interested in numbers – one in googology, one in global economics – both are appearing at the Festival, and both are likely to be fascinating speakers.

What’s googology? It’s the study of huge numbers, as mathematical logician Richard Elwes explains in his book called just that – Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously.

He has made a study of how, by hunting down and taming ever bigger numbers, arithmetic has reshaped human thought and made our modern era of computation possible.

In contrast, Olive Bullough is an investigative journalist who takes his readers on an adventure through the flip side of the global economy.

His book Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won is an entertaining expose of the dark financial secrets at the heart of the world economy. All efforts at legislation and compliance have failed, he says.