Big Math

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?