Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously - Science Book Club

About this event

**\*\*The Science Book Club meets at Eastbank Regional Library in the Audiovisual Room on the second floor.\*\*** ***Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7*** by Richard Elwes FROM AMAZON -- "How humanity’s long pursuit of ever-larger numbers broke the boundaries of mathematics and propelled us into the Information Age *“A charming tour”*—Jordan Ellenburg, author of *Shape* 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 in *Huge Numbers*, 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." ***\*\*It is recommended, but not required that you read the book. All may participate in the discussion.\*\****