Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously is the strange story of maths as told by mathematical logician Richard Elwes.

What if, every time you wanted to write down 1,000,000 you had had to draw a picture of a god? And what if that number was the biggest you had a symbol for?

He shows how, by hunting down and studying ever-bigger numbers, arithmetic has reshaped human thought and made our modern era of science and computation possible.

Huge Numbers reveals a world where most numbers remain out of reach until we discover how to chase them down and tame them, and so continually remake our world.

“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, computer scientist