The epic story of how a handful of surprisingly simple mathematical ideas have sparked today's technological breakthroughs-from Netflix's recommendation algorithm to medical imaging to artificial intelligence and beyond-while also slipping further and further from our understanding, with potentially earth-shaking consequences.
We live in a world fueled by math that we barely notice. It's in every photo you post to Instagram, every Google search you make, and every answer you get back from ChatGPT. It routes our packages and planes, maps social networks, and predicts the weather. This is Big Math, and it is quietly running our world-while also reshaping it in ways we can't yet comprehend. A toolkit of powerful ideas such as matrices and vectors, networks and optimization, Big Math allows humanity to tackle problems too vast to hold in our heads. It is transforming how we shop, communicate, live, and heal. Yet the tools themselves are not especially new or mysterious. We created them, and for most of their history we understood them and controlled them. But once we began supercharging them with computers to explore truly enormous systems, things changed.
Now, as celebrated mathematicians Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend reveal in this dazzling and unsettling book, Big Math is beginning to drift beyond our grasp, even as it delivers greater gifts and power through machine learning and, soon, quantum computing. What happens when Big Math outgrows its creators-when it becomes something we no longer understand, but only witness? And how can we learn to live wisely with tools that grow stronger and stranger every day? Steven Strogatz is the Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Mathematics at Cornell University. He is the author of Sync, The Joy of x, and Infinite Powers, which was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Royal Society Science Book Prize. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he is one of the world's most highly cited mathematicians and a frequent contributor to The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is also a regular guest on Radiolab, Science Friday, and Veritasium. He lives in Ithaca, New York.
Alex Townsend is an associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University and a leading researcher in numerical linear algebra, scientific computing, and scientific artificial intelligence. He has received major international prizes in numerical analysis and linear algebra, including the Leslie Fox Prize and SIAM awards in both Linear Algebra and Computational Science and Engineering. An award-winning teacher, he is a recipient of Cornell University's Stephen H. Weiss Junior Fellowship for excellence in undergraduate teaching. He lives in Ithaca, New York.
