The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Hidden History of Math's Unsung Trailblazers

Shortlisted for the 2024 British Academy Book Prize

A new history of mathematics focusing on the marginalized voices who propelled the discipline, spanning six continents and thousands of years of untold stories.

"A book to make you love math." —Financial Times

Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. But despite its reputation as the study of fundamental truths, the stories we have been told about it are wrong—warped like the sixteenth-century map that enlarged Europe at the expense of Afr...