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...