Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.

Virginia Woolf

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Vaclav Smil

From the internationally bestselling author, a revealing look at the surprising numbers that uncover the hidden forces shaping our world 
 
'There is no author whose books I look forward to more' Bill Gates 
 
‘There is perhaps no other academic who paints pictures with numbers like Smil’ Guardian 
 
What do marriage, milk and the black market tell us about the state of humanity? Most people would say, not much at all. But the numbers reveal startling truths about who we are, how we live and where we’re headed. For centuries we’ve told ourselves stories about how the world works – yet the data often point to a very different reality. In Numbers Tell Stories, Vaclav Smil shows how statistics challenge conventional thinking and illuminate the hidden forces shaping our lives. 
 
Take marriage. Weren’t people in the past married off as children? In fact, in eighteenth-century France, the median age was 29 for men and 27 for women – not that different to today. Or longevity. Should we look to Japan to unlock the secrets of a long, healthy life? Perhaps – but only one in five Japanese men and women retains full independence in old age. Even the world’s healthiest nation still has far to go. And waste. It sounds absurd, but discarded electronics contain more gold per ton than gold ore itself – our rubbish is richer than our mines. 
 
Climate change is another challenge we know is huge – but the real shock is the scale of the economic effort required to act in time. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions on the recommended timescale would demand 15 to 20 per cent of annual GDP in wealthy countries – roughly equivalent to the resources mobilised by the Allies to win the Second World War. Numbers on that scale are not abstract: they would transform daily life. 
 
Behind every familiar story, Smil uncovers the statistics that can reframe the past, jolt our view of the present, and change how we think about the future.

Numbers Tell Stories

How Data Reveals the Surprising Truths About Our World

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

'There is no author whose books I look forward to more' Bill Gates 
 
‘There is perhaps no other academic who paints pictures with numbers like Smil’ Guardian 
 
Discover how speed shapes life on Earth, from grinding geological processes to the astonishing speed of light. In this wide-ranging ideas book, internationally bestselling author Vaclav Smil explores the connections between speed, nature, and human innovation. With surprising insights - like how erosion actually accelerates mountain growth - Smil debunks the myth that modern life is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. 
 
Combining compelling statistics with insightful analysis, Smil take readers on a captivating journey through the vast timescales of Earth’s history all the way down to the complexities of the present day. 
 
Smil explains how we measure speed and reveals its theoretical limits, offering a thought-provoking look at the forces defining our world. This eye-opening book encourages readers to see speed’s vital role in everything around us.

Speed

How it Explains the World

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nate Silver

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

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

David Spiegelhalter

We live in a world where uncertainty is inevitable. How should we deal with what we don’t know? And what role do chance, luck and coincidence play in our lives? 
 
David Spiegelhalter has spent his career dissecting data in order to understand risks and assess the chances of what might happen in the future. In The Art of Uncertainty, he gives readers a window onto how we can all do this better. 
 
In engaging, crystal-clear prose, he takes us through the principles of probability, showing how it can help us think more analytically about everything from medical advice to pandemics and climate change forecasts, and explores how we can update our beliefs about the future in the face of constantly changing experience. Along the way, he explains why roughly 40% of football results come down to luck rather than talent, how the National Risk Register assesses near-term risks to the United Kingdom, and why we can be so confident that two properly shuffled packs of cards have never, ever been in the exact same order. 
 
Drawing on a wide range of captivating real-world examples, this is an essential guide to navigating uncertainty while also having the humility to admit what we do not know.

The Art of Uncertainty

How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck

Leonard Mlodinow

Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives is an exhilarating, eye-opening guide to understanding our random world. 
 
Randomness and uncertainty surround everything we do. So why are we so bad at understanding them? 
 
The same tools that help us understand the random paths of molecules can be applied to the randomness that governs so many aspects of our everyday lives, from winning the lottery to road safety, and reveals the truth about the success of sporting heroes and film stars, and even how to make sense of a blood test. 
 
The Drunkard's Walk reveals the psychological illusions that prevent us understanding everything from stock-picking to wine-tasting - read it, or risk becoming another victim of chance. 
 
'A wonderfully readable guide to how the mathematical laws of randomness affect our lives' Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time

The Drunkard's Walk

How Randomness Rules Our Lives

J. Doyne Farmer

We live in an age of increasing complexity, where accelerating technology and global interconnection hold more promise – and more peril – than any other time in human history. The fossil fuels that have powered global wealth creation now threaten to destroy the world they helped build. Automation and digitization promise prosperity for some, unemployment for others. Financial crises fuel growing inequality, polarization and the retreat of democracy. At heart, all these problems are rooted in the economy, yet the guidance provided by economic models has often failed. 
 
Many books have been written about Doyne Farmer and his work, but Making Sense of Chaos is the first in his own words. It presents a manifesto for how to do economics better. A tale of science and ideas, Farmer fuses his profound knowledge and expertise with stories from his life to explain how we can bring a scientific revolution to bear on the economic conundrums facing society. 
 
Using big data and ever more powerful computers, we are now able for the first time to apply complex systems science to economic activity, building realistic models of the global economy. The resulting simulations and the emergent behavior we observe form the cornerstone of the science of complexity economics, allowing us to test ideas and make significantly better economic predictions – to better address the hard problems facing the world.

Making Sense of Chaos

A Better Economics for a Better World

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

Steven Pinker

In the twenty-first century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding - and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that discovered vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, quack cures and conspiracy theorizing? 
 
 In Rationality, Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply an irrational species. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives and set the benchmarks for rationality itself. Instead, he explains, we think in ways that suit the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning we have built up over millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, and decision-making under uncertainty. These tools are not a standard part of our educational curricula, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book - until now. 
 
 Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Brimming with insight and humour, Rationality will enlighten, inspire and empower.

Rationality

What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

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

'One of the smartest books of all time' Fortune 
 
 Everyone wants to succeed in life. But what causes some of us to be more successful than others? Is it really down to skill and strategy - or something altogether more unpredictable? This book is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about business and the world. 
 
 It is all about luck: more precisely, how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences. 
 
 Nowhere is this more obvious than in the markets - we hear an entrepreneur has 'vision' or a trader is 'talented', but all too often their performance is down to chance rather than skill. It is only because we fail to understand probability that we continue to believe events are non-random, finding reasons where none exist. This irreverent bestseller has shattered the illusions of people around the world by teaching them how to recognize randomness. Now it can do the same for you. 
 
 Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a radical and paradoxical philosopher for our times. He has spent his life immersing himself in problems of luck, uncertainty, probability, and knowledge, and he has led three high-profile careers around his ideas, as a man of letters, as a businessman-trader, and as a university professor and researcher. 
 
 He is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute. His books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan have been published in thirty-three languages. Taleb refuses all awards and honours as they debase knowledge by turning it into competitive sports.

Fooled by Randomness

The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

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

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

Through Euclid's Window, Leonard Mlondinow brilliantly and delightfully leads us on a journey through five revolutions in geometry, from the Greek concept of parallel lines to the latest notions of hyperspace. This new, refreshing, alternative history of maths reveals how simple questions anyone might ask about space in the living room or in some other galaxy have been the hidden engine of science's highest achievements.

Euclid's Window

The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace

We have never had so much information at our fingertips and yet most of us don't know how the world really works. This book explains seven of the most fundamental realities governing our survival and prosperity. From energy and food production, through our material world and its globalization, to risks, our environment and its future, How the World Really Works offers a much-needed reality check - because before we can tackle problems effectively, we must understand the facts. 
 
 In this ambitious and thought-provoking book we see, for example, that globalization isn't inevitable and that our societies have been steadily increasing their dependence on fossil fuels, making their complete and rapid elimination unlikely. Drawing on the latest science and tackling sources of misinformation head on - from Yuval Noah Harari to Noam Chomsky - ultimately Smil answers the most profound question of our age: are we irrevocably doomed or is a brighter utopia ahead?

How the World Really Works

A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

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

Is flying dangerous? How much do the world's cows weigh? And what makes people happy? 
 
From earth's nations and inhabitants, through the fuels and foods that energize them, to the transportation and inventions of our modern world - and how all of this affects the planet itself - in Numbers Don't Lie, Professor Vaclav Smil takes us on a fact-finding adventure, using surprising statistics and illuminating graphs to challenge lazy thinking. 
 
Packed with 'Well-I-never-knew-that' information and with fascinating and unusual examples throughout, we find out how many people it took to build the Great Pyramid, that vaccination yields the best return on investment, and why electric cars aren't as great as we think (yet). There's a wonderful mix of science, history and wit, all in bite-sized chapters on a broad range of topics. 
 
Urgent and essential, Numbers Don't Lie inspires readers to interrogate what they take to be true in these significant times. Smil is on a mission to make facts matter, because after all, numbers may not lie, but which truth do they convey?

Numbers Don't Lie

71 Things You Need to Know About the World

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

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