{"product_id":"huge-numbers-a-story-of-counting-ambitiously-from-4-1-2-to-fish-7","title":"Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1\/2 to Fish 7","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHow humanity's long pursuit of ever-larger numbers broke the boundaries of mathematics and propelled us into the Information Age \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"A charming tour\"--Jordan Ellenburg, author of \u003ci\u003eShape\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs mathematician Richard Elwes shows in \u003ci\u003eHuge Numbers\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhere many math books celebrate abstract algebra or ineffable infinities, \u003ci\u003eHuge Numbers\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Basic Books","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":53549709623664,"sku":"9781541605923","price":32.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0954\/1304\/3568\/files\/imageloader_e078fc73-5eda-4a80-9b30-96c362251f50.jpg?v=1776230106","url":"https:\/\/aveson.store\/products\/huge-numbers-a-story-of-counting-ambitiously-from-4-1-2-to-fish-7","provider":"Aveson","version":"1.0","type":"link"}