Richard Elwes, "Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7" (Basic Books, 2026)

About this episode

Richard Elwes discusses his book 'Huge Numbers' and the strange story of counting and mathematics.

What if, every time you wanted to write down 1,000,000, you had to draw a picture of a god? And what if that number were the biggest you had a symbol for? If you were doing math in ancient Egypt, those were the rules: anything bigger broke math.As mathematician Richard Elwes shows i n Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7 (Basic Books, 2026) this is the strange story of math. Even today, writing down some numbers is beyond us: try it with all the zeroes in a googolplex, or an outrageous alien number like TREE(3). Safer not to try: even harnessing every particle in the universe, you wouldn’t come close. But this book is no mere bestiary of numerical monsters. It 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.Where many math books celebrate abstract algebra or ineffable infinities, Huge Numbers is both more practical and far weirder. It reveals a world where most numbers remain out of reach until we discover how to chase them down and tame them, and so remake our world again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Richard Elwes

Topics covered

• mathematics
• counting
• huge numbers
• history of math
• arithmetic
• science

Keywords

• huge numbers
• counting
• mathematics
• arithmetic
• googolplex
• TREE(3)
• science
• computation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Basic Books

Books & works: Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7

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