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

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 ...