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Nikita Lalwani

Cardiff in the 1980s is a place where maths can get you noticed. Rumis Vasi is the town's 'maths prodigy': untangling numbers and Rubik's Cubes protects her from the harsh vagaries of the playground and gives a pattern to her world. But after years of her father's determined tutoring, Rumi finds that numbers are beginning to lose their innocence. India infuses her with a romantic sense of belonging and, as she grows older, and desire becomes a dirty word in the Vasi household, the idea of love is opened up to painful examination. 
 
In a voice that is by turns very funny and fiercely tender, Nikita Lalwani brings us a captivating story of high aspirations and deep longing, and of the sometime loneliness of childhood.

Gifted

Henry Dudeney

"Regular exercise is supposed to be as necessary for the brain as for the body. Many of us are very apt to suffer from mental cobwebs, and there is nothing equal to the solving of puzzles for sweeping them away." - Henry Dudeney (1847-1930) 
 
First published in 1907, Dudeney's The Canterbury Puzzles is a classic of the genre, based on characters from Chaucer's Tales. The book contains 114 puzzles suitable for young enthusiasts, recreational mathematicians and veteran puzzlers alike. As challenging today as it was over a century ago, this ingenious book will provide hours-worth of puzzles to keep your brain alert.

The Canterbury Puzzles

Nate Silver

Every time we choose a route to work, decide whether to go on a second date, or set aside money for a rainy day, we are making a prediction about the future. Yet from the financial crisis to ecological disasters, we routinely fail to foresee hugely significant events, often at great cost to society. 
 
In The Signal and the Noise, the New York Times political forecaster Nate Silver, who accurately predicted the results of every single state in the 2012 US election, reveals how we can all develop better foresight in an uncertain world. From the stock market to the poker table, from earthquakes to the economy, he takes us on an enthralling insider's tour of the high-stakes world of forecasting, showing how we can use information in a smarter way amid a noise of data - and make better predictions in our own lives.

The Signal and the Noise

The Art and Science of Prediction

Stephen Baker

In a world teeming with data, we ourselves become the maths gurus' most prized specimens. 
 
In They've Got Your Number..., Stephen Baker takes us on a guided tour (no maths required) through an unprecedented new era. Much in the same way as neuroscientists are mapping our brains, mathematicians are mapping our behaviour - what we do, who we are, how we work, chat, play and shop - everything that makes us individuals. In doing so, they will change every aspect of our lives. 
 
They've Got Your Number... examines one of the great undertakings of the twenty-first century - the mathematical modelling of humanity. It's a world that otherwise might seem remote or disconnected, but one which is absolutely relevant to our everyday lives.

They've Got Your Number...

Data, Digits and Destiny - how the Numerati are changing our Lives

Robin Wilson

Lewis Carroll's books have delighted children and adults for generations, but behind their exuberant fantasy and delightful nonsense was the mind of a brilliant mathematician. 
 
Now his forgotten achievements in the world of numbers are brought to light by acclaimed author and mathematician Robin Wilson. Here he explores the curious imagination of a man whose pioneering work at Oxford University included investigations into voting patterns and tennis seeding, who dreamt up numerical conundrums in bed at night and who filled his writings with problems, paradoxes, puzzles and teasing games of logic. 
 
Taking us into a world of mock turtles and maps, gryphons and gravity, Lewis Carroll in Numberland reveals the singular mind of a genius.

Lewis Carroll in Numberland

His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life

Robert Kaplan

Ellen  Kaplan

It is easy to be wary of mathematics - but as this book shows, drawing on science, literature and philosophy, its patterns are evrywhere. In witty and eloquent prose, Robert and Ellen Kaplan take mathematics back to its estranged audience, bringing understanding and clarity to a traditionally difficult subject, and revealing the beauty behind the equations. Only by letting loose our curiosity can we learn to appreciate the wonder that can be found in mathematics - an 'art' invented by humans, which is also timeless.

The Art of the Infinite

Our Lost Language of Numbers

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The phenomenal international bestseller that shows us how to stop trying to predict everything - and take advantage of uncertainty 
 
What have the invention of the wheel, Pompeii, the Wall Street Crash, Harry Potter and the internet got in common? Why are all forecasters con-artists? Why should you never run for a train or read a newspaper? 
 
This book is all about Black Swans: the random events that underlie our lives, from bestsellers to world disasters. Their impact is huge; they're impossible to predict; yet after they happen we always try to rationalize them. 
 
'Taleb is a bouncy and even exhilarating guide ... I came to relish what he said, and even develop a sneaking affection for him as a person' Will Self, Independent on Sunday 
 
'He leaps like some superhero of the mind' Boyd Tonkin, Independent

The Black Swan

The Impact of the Highly Improbable

C. Thi Nguyen

Scoring systems are everywhere. Underpinning our daily lives – whether it’s the fit bits on our wrists, likes on social media, and even school rankings – they have become pervasive and increasingly dangerous, warping our desires and outsourcing our values to external institutions. Instead of encouraging us to be more playful, to take pleasure in the journey of striving towards a goal, institutions, corporations and bureaucracies weaponize scoring systems to impose their own interests. No matter what, we always seem to be playing by someone else’s rules. 
 
In The Score, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen shows us how this newly ‘gamified’ world has fundamentally captured our value systems, turning what might be moral or personal life choices into numerical data, and forcing us to prioritise what can be measured and monetized over what is truly meaningful to us. 
 
A life-long lover of online and board games himself, Nguyen argues that we should not stop playing games but rather take a step back and become more aware of their immersive and profound power, so that we might chart a way towards more creative and joyful lives. To start playing our own game.

The Score

How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game

Donal O'Shea

The Poincar&eacute; Conjecture tells the story behind one of the world&rsquo;s most confounding mathematical theories. Formulated in 1904 by Henri Poincar&eacute;, his Conjecture promised to describe the very shape of the universe, but remained unproved until a huge prize was offered for its solution in 2000. Six years later, an eccentric Russian mathematician had the answer. 
 
Here, Donal O&rsquo;Shea explains the maths behind the Conjecture and its proof, and illuminates the curious personalities surrounding this perplexing conundrum, along the way taking in a grand sweep of scientific history from the ancient Greeks to Christopher Columbus. This is an enthralling tale of human endeavour, intellectual brilliance and the thrill of discovery.

The Poincaré Conjecture

In Search of the Shape of the Universe

David Hand

Why is it that incredibly unlikely phenomena actually happen quite regularly and why should we, in fact, expect such things to happen? Here, in this highly original book - aimed squarely at anyone with an interest in coincidences, probability or gambling - eminent statistician David Hand answers this question by weaving together various strands of probability into a unified explanation, which he calls the improbability principle. 
 
This is a book that will appeal not only to those who love stories about startling coincidences and extraordinarily rare events, but also to those who are interested in how a single bold idea links areas as diverse as gambling, the weather, airline disasters and creative writing as well as the origin of life and even the universe. The Improbability Principle will change your perspective on how the world works – and tell you what the Bible code and Shakespeare have in common, how to win the lottery, why Apple's song shuffling was made less random to seem more random. Oh and why lightning does in fact strike twice...

The Improbability Principle

Why coincidences, miracles and rare events happen all the time

In the bestselling The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver showed how forecasting would define the age of Big Data. Now, in this timely and riveting new book, Silver investigates "The River," or those whose mastery of risk allows them to shape—and dominate—so much of modern life. 
 
These professional risk takers—poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true-believers and blue-chip art collectors—can teach us much about navigating the uncertainty of the 21st century. By embedding within these worlds, Silver offers insight into a range of issues that affect us all, from the frontiers of finance to the future of AI. 
 
The River has increasing amounts of wealth and power in our society, and understanding their mindset—including the flaws in their thinking—is key to understanding what drives technology and the global economy today. There are certain commonalities in this otherwise diverse group: high tolerance for risk; appreciation of uncertainty; affinity for numbers; skill at de-coupling; self-reliance and a distrust of the conventional wisdom. For the River, complexity is baked in, and the work is how to navigate it, without going beyond the pale. 
 
Taking us behind-the-scenes from casinos to venture capital firms to meetings of the effective altruism movement, On the Edge is a deeply-reported, all-access journey into a hidden world of powerbrokers and risk takers.

On the Edge

The Art of Risking Everything

James Poskett

In this major retelling of the history of science from 1450 to the present day, James Poskett explodes the myth that science began in Europe. 
 
The blinkered Western gaze focusing on individual 'genius' - Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Einstein - was only one part of the story. The reality was an utterly global, non-linear pattern of cross-fertilization, competition, cooperation and outright conflict. Each rupture in history carved fresh channels for global exchange. 
 
Here, for the first time, Poskett celebrates how scientists from Africa, America, Asia and the Pacific were integral to this very human story. We meet Graman Kwasi, the African botanist who discovered a new cure for malaria; Hantaro Nagaoka, the Japanese scientist who first described the structure of the atom; and Zhao Zhongyao, the Chinese physicist who discovered antimatter.

Horizons

A Global History of Science

Barry Mazur

The book shows how the art of mathematical imagining is not as mysterious as it seems. Drawing on a variety of artistic resources the author reveals how anyone can begin to visualize the enigmatic 'imaginary numbers' that first baffled mathematicians in the 16th century.

Imagining Numbers

(Particularly the Square Root of Minus Fifteen)

Matt Parker

What makes a bridge wobble when it's not meant to? How do billions of dollars mysteriously vanish into thin air? How does a building rock when its resonant frequency matches a gym class leaping to Snap's 1990 hit I've Got The Power? The answer is maths. Or, to be precise, what happens when maths goes wrong in the real world. 
 
As Matt Parker shows us, our modern lives are built on maths: computer programmes, finance, engineering. And most of the time this maths works quietly behind the scenes, until ... it doesn't. Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near-misses and mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman empire and a hapless Olympic shooting team, Matt Parker shows us the bizarre ways maths trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world. This book shows how, by making maths our friend, we can learn from its pitfalls. It also contains puzzles, challenges, geometric socks, jokes about binary code and three deliberate mistakes. Getting it wrong has never been more fun.

Humble Pi

A Comedy of Maths Errors

Cathy O'Neil

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives - whether we get a job or a loan, how much we pay for insurance - are being made by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated. But as Cathy O'Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and incontestable, even when they're wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination, creating a toxic cocktail for democracy. 
 
Tracing the arc of a person's life, Cathy O'Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future as individuals and as a society. These "weapons of math destruction" score teachers and students, sort CVs, grant or deny loans, evaluate workers, target voters and monitor our health. O'Neil calls on modellers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and on policy makers to regulate their use. But in the end, it's up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives.

Weapons of Math Destruction

How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

Every time we choose a route to work, decide whether to go on a second date, or set aside money for a rainy day, we are making a prediction about the future. Yet from the global financial crisis to 9/11 to the Fukushima disaster, we often fail to foresee hugely significant events. In The Signal and the Noise, the New York Times' political forecaster and statistics guru Nate Silver explores the art of prediction, revealing how we can all build a better crystal ball. 
 
In his quest to distinguish the true signal from a universe of noisy data, Silver visits hundreds of expert forecasters, in fields ranging from the stock market to the poker table, from earthquakes to terrorism. What lies behind their success? And why do so many predictions still fail? By analysing the rare prescient forecasts, and applying a more quantitative lens to everyday life, Silver distils the essential lessons of prediction. 
 
We live in an increasingly data-driven world, but it is harder than ever to detect the true patterns amid the noise of information. In this dazzling insider's tour of the world of forecasting, Silver reveals how we can all develop better foresight in our everyday lives.

Cédric Villani

“This man could plainly do for mathematics what Brian Cox has done for physics” — Sunday Times 
 
How does a genius see the world? Where and how does inspiration strike? 
 
Cédric Villani takes us on a mesmerising adventure as he wrestles with the Boltzmann equation – a new theorem that will eventually win him the most coveted prize in mathematics and a place in the mathematical history books. Along the way he encounters obstacles and setbacks, losses of faith and even brushes with madness. 
 
His story is one of courage and partnership, doubt and anxiety, elation and despair. Of ordinary family life blurring with the abstract world of mathematical physics, of theories and equations that haunt your dreams and seeking the elusive inspiration found only in a locked, darkened room. 
 
Blending science with history, biography with myth, Villani conjures up an inimitable cast: the omnipresent Einstein, mad genius Kurt Godel, and Villani’s personal hero, John Nash. 
 
Step inside the magical world of Cédric Villani…

Birth of a Theorem

A Mathematical Adventure

Naomi Sani

Does the sight of your child's maths homework fill you with dread? Do you look for any excuse when they ask you to explain equations, fractions or multiplication? Maths can often leave children - and parents - perplexed. 
 
How to do Maths so Your Children Can Too works through maths topics with a simple step-by-step approach, explaining the new ways of teaching maths that confuse so many parents. This book will show you how to: 
 
- Master 'number bonds' and 'number lines' 
- Divide by 'chunking' 
- Multiply using 'the grid method' 
- Work with fractions, percentages and ratios 
- Understand number and place value 
 
Bridging the gap between primary and secondary school - when children often struggle - and packed full of simple, accessible examples, this essential guide will banish your maths phobia and take the pain out of homework time.

How to do Maths so Your Children Can Too

The essential parents' guide

Ian Stewart

Jack Cohen

Do we live in a simple or a complex universe? Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart explore the ability of complicated rules to generate simple behaviour in nature through 'the collapse of chaos'. 'The most startling, thought-provoking book I've read all year. I was pleased to learn that most of the things I thought I knew were wrong' -- Terry Pratchett

The Collapse of Chaos

Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World

Bobby Seagull

If you found maths lessons at school irrelevant and boring, that’s because you didn’t have a teacher like Bobby Seagull. 
 
***As seen on Monkman &amp; Seagull's Genius Guide to Britain*** 
 
Long before his rise to cult fandom on University Challenge, Bobby Seagull was obsessed with numbers. They were the keys that unlocked the randomness of football results, the beauty of art and the best way to get things done. 
 
In his absorbing book, Bobby tells the story of his life through numbers and shows the incredible ways maths can make sense of the world around us. From magic shows to rap lyrics, from hobbies to outer space, from fitness to food – Bobby’s infectious enthusiasm for numbers will change how you think about almost everything. 
 
Told through fascinating stories and insights from Bobby’s life, and with head-scratching puzzles in every chapter, you’ll never look at numbers the same way again.

The Life-Changing Magic of Numbers

John D. Barrow

How do you begin to understand the concept of nothing? 
 
Where does it begin and where does it end? 
 
From the zeros of the mathematician to the void of the philosophers, from Shakespeare to the empty set, from the ether to the quantum vacuum, from being and nothingness to creatio ex nihilo, there is much ado about nothing at the heart of things. 
 
Recent exciting discoveries in astronomy are shown to shed new light on the nature of the vacuum and its dramatic effect upon the explanation of the Universe. This remarkable book ranges over every nook and cranny of nothingness to reveal how the human mind has had to make something of nothing in every field of human enquiry.

The Book Of Nothing

Vaclav Smil

The New York Times bestselling author returns with a mind-opening exploration of how size defines life on Earth. 
 
Explaining the key processes shaping size in nature, society and technology, Smil busts myths around proportions - from bodies to paintings and the so-called golden ratio - tells us what Jonathan Swift got wrong in Gulliver's Travels - the giant Brobdingnagian's legs would buckle under their enormous weight - and dives headfirst into the most contentious issue in ergonomics: the size of aeroplane seats. 
 
It is no exaggeration to say this fascinating and wide-ranging tour de force will change the way you look at absolutely everything.

Size

How It Explains the World

Wilfrid Hodges

If a man supports Arsenal one day and Spurs the next then he is fickle but not necessarily illogical. From this starting point, and assuming no previous knowledge of logic, Wilfrid Hodges takes the reader through the whole gamut of logical expressions in a simple and lively way. Readers who are more mathematically adventurous will find optional sections introducing rather more challenging material. 'A lively and stimulating book' Philosophy

Logic

Jordan Ellenberg

The maths we learn in school can seem like an abstract set of rules, laid down by the ancients and not to be questioned. In fact, Jordan Ellenberg shows us, maths touches on everything we do, and a little mathematical knowledge reveals the hidden structures that lie beneath the world's messy and chaotic surface. In How Not to be Wrong, Ellenberg explores the mathematician's method of analyzing life, from the everyday to the cosmic, showing us which numbers to defend, which ones to ignore, and when to change the equation entirely. Along the way, he explains calculus in a single page, describes Gödel's theorem using only one-syllable words, and reveals how early you actually need to get to the airport.

How Not to Be Wrong

The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life

John Allen Paulos

Paulos offers a hillarious account of how the stock market both follows and defies mathematical principals. He offers an enagaing overview of everything from &quot;betas&quot; to the efficient market hypothesis.

A Mathematician Plays the Market

Kate Kitagawa

Timothy Revell

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. In The Secret Lives of Numbers, historian Kate Kitagawa and journalist Timothy Revell introduce readers to the mathematical boundary-smashers who have been erased by history because of their race, gender or nationality. 
 
From the brilliant Arabic scholars of the ninth-century House of Wisdom, and the pioneering African American mathematicians of the twentieth century, to the 'lady computers' around the world who revolutionised our knowledge of the night sky, we meet these fascinating trailblazers and see how they contributed to our global knowledge today. 
 
This revisionist, completely accessible and radically inclusive history of mathematics is as entertaining as it is important.

The Secret Lives of Numbers

A Global History of Mathematics & Its Unsung Trailblazers

A Global History of Mathematics & its Unsung Trailblazers

Dan Gardner

We are the safest humans who ever lived - the statistics prove it. And yet the media tells a different story with its warnings and scare stories. How is it possible that anxiety has become the stuff of daily life? 
 
In this ground-breaking, compulsively readable book, Dan Gardner shows how our flawed strategies for perceiving risk influence our lives, often with unforeseen and sometimes-tragic consequences. He throws light on our paranoia about everything from paedophiles to terrorism and reveals how the most significant threats are actually the mundane risks to which we pay little attention. 
 
Speaking to psychologists and scientists, as well as looking at the influence of the media and politicians, Gardner uncovers one of the central puzzles of our time: why are the safest people in history living in a culture of fear?

Risk

The Science and Politics of Fear

Judea Pearl

Dana Mackenzie

'Correlation does not imply causation.' This mantra was invoked by scientists for decades in order to avoid taking positions as to whether one thing caused another, such as smoking and cancer and carbon dioxide and global warming. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, sparked by world-renowned computer scientist Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and placed cause and effect on a firm scientific basis. Now, Pearl and science journalist Dana Mackenzie explain causal thinking to general readers for the first time, showing how it allows us to explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It is the essence of human and artificial intelligence. And just as Pearl's discoveries have enabled machines to think better, The Book of Why explains how we can think better.

The Book of Why

The New Science of Cause and Effect

Daniel Nahum Rockmore

Like a hunter who sees 'a bit of blood' on the trail, that's how Princeton mathematician Peter Sarnak describes the feeling of chasing an idea that seems to have a chance of success. If this is so, then the jungle of abstractions that is mathematics is full of frenzied hunters these days. They are out stalking big game: the resolution of 'The Riemann Hypothesis', seems to be in their sights. The Riemann Hypothesis is about the prime numbers, the fundamental numerical elements. Stated in 1859 by Professor Bernhard Riemann, it proposes a simple law which Riemann believed a 'very likely' explanation for the way in which the primes are distributed among the whole numbers, indivisible stars scattered without end throughout a boundless numerical universe. Just eight years later, at the tender age of thirty-nine Riemann would be dead from tuberculosis, cheated of the opportunity to settle his conjecture. For over a century, the Riemann Hypothesis has stumped the greatest of mathematical minds, but these days frustration has begun to give way to excitement. This unassuming comment is revealing astounding connections among nuclear physics, chaos and number theory, creating a frenzy of intellectual excitement amplified by the recent promise of a one million dollar bounty. The story of the quest to settle the Riemann Hypothesis is one of scientific exploration. It is peopled with solitary hermits and gregarious cheerleaders, cool calculators and wild-eyed visionaries, Nobel Prize-winners and Fields Medalists. To delve into the Riemann Hypothesis is to gain a window into the world of modern mathematics and the nature of mathematics research.  Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis will open wide this window so that all may gaze through it in amazement.

Stalking The Riemann Hypothesis

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