Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World (Copy)

The epic story of how a handful of surprisingly simple mathematical ideas have sparked today’s technological breakthroughs—from Netflix’s recommendation algorithm to medical imaging to artificial intelligence and beyond—while also slipping further and further from our understanding, with potentially earth-shaking consequences.

It’s in every photo you post to Instagram, every Google search you make, and every answer you get back from ChatGPT. It routes our packages and planes, maps social networks, and predicts the weather. This is Big Math, and it is quietly running our world—while also reshaping it in ways we can’t yet comprehend. A toolkit of powerful ideas such as matrices and vectors, networks and optimization, Big Math allows humanity to tackle problems too vast to hold in our heads. Yet the tools themselves are not especially new or mysterious. We created them, and for most of their history we understood them and controlled them. But once we began supercharging them with computers to explore truly enormous systems, things changed.

Now, as celebrated mathematicians Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend reveal in this dazzling and unsettling book, Big Math is beginning to drift beyond our grasp, even as it delivers greater gifts and power through machine learning and, soon, quantum computing. What happens when Big Math outgrows its creators—when it becomes something we no longer understand, but only witness? And how can we learn to live wisely with tools that grow stronger and stranger every day?

Praise

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• “Big Math is essential reading for our increasingly confused times: insightful, humane, and clarifying. It cuts through the flood of mystification around AI and it recenters the human in the equation. Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend are as trustworthy as they are far-seeing.”

  — James Gleick, author of The Telephone: A New History

• “Everyone has to reckon with the pervasive phenomenon that Strogatz and Townsend have christened Big Math—the hyper-connected, data-saturated, computer-assisted mathematical machinery governing everything from corporate boardrooms to politics to AI therapists. Written with warmth and generosity, Big Math is an invaluable gift for anyone who feels locked out of this present moment. This book illuminates a path to confidence in an increasingly mathematical brave new world.”

  — Janna Levin, author of Black Hole Survival Guide

• “Your chatbot doesn’t want you to read this book—you might get a better understanding of how AI works and you could become the one in control. Through its vivid stories, Big Math traces how we got here and what’s at stake: human ownership of the future.”

  — Alan Alda

• “Math just keeps getting bigger. Strogatz and Townsend, experts themselves in some of the largest-scale math problems in the world, provide a friendly and authoritative guide to the way math has scaled up, from the frontiers of quantum computing to the piles of boxes in Amazon’s warehouses.”

  — Jordan Ellenberg, author of How Not to Be Wrong

• “A thrilling journey through the mathematics quietly and profoundly shaping modern life.”

  — Brian Greene, author of The Fabric of the Cosmos and Until the End of Time

• “Strogatz and Townsend have done something I would have thought impossible: they’ve written a book about math that is absolutely overflowing with ideas and intuition, yet almost devoid of equations. The perfect book for our times, Big Math will captivate and enthrall any reader.”

  — Steven Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics

• “From launching rockets to recommending your next impulse purchase, the combination of powerful computers and novel mathematical techniques is shaping our world in unanticipated ways. We’re entering the Big Math era, and there is no going back. I can’t think of a better guide than this book, written by true experts in a way everyone can understand.”

  — Sean Carroll, author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe series

• “Big Math reveals how the miraculous technologies of our modern world are built on a foundation of profound and surprisingly beautiful mathematics. In this book, Strogatz and Townsend work their own miracle: their personable and down-to-earth writing makes even the most complex ideas completely accessible and thoroughly enjoyable. In short, Big Math is a colossal delight!”

  — Melanie Mitchell, author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

• “This mind-expanding book reveals the mathematics all around us. The math professors we should all have had, Strogatz and Townsend explain complex ideas beautifully, making them accessible to everyone. At times Big Math is unsettling, at times inspiring, but throughout it is empowering. I couldn’t put it down.”

  — Jo Boaler, Stanford professor, cofounder of youcubed, and author of Limitless Mind

• “Big Math is Big Fun. Strogatz and Townsend tell the story of how a few unglamorous mathematical concepts, revved up with massive computational power, have changed the world. The subject is topical and fascinating, but what I loved most about this book is that it is so enjoyable to read. The text is lively, beautifully clear, and endlessly engaging. Math popularisation at its best.”

  — Alex Bellos, author of The Grapes of Math and Here’s Looking at Euclid

• “We live in a world of equations and algorithms that most of us can neither see nor understand. Now we can do both. Big Math is a fascinating and engaging tour of the invisible structures on which modern life is built. Who knew math could be so easy … and so much fun?”

  — Daniel Gilbert, Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, author of Stumbling on Happiness

• “I might still count on my fingers, but I loved Big Math . From stories about cancer risk prediction and space exploration to deep insights about big data, AI, and the forces shaping our world, I found myself charmed and captivated. This book has helped me appreciate the power of numbers in our lives—and the need to think deeply and responsibly about their implications as we move into the future.”

  — Maria Konnikova, author of The Biggest Bluff and Mastermind

• “A compelling account of how math really is governing the powerful tools of modern life.””

  — Eugenia Cheng, author of How to Bake Pi and Is Math Real?