Numbercrunch: A Mathematician's Toolkit for Making Sense of Your World

Popular science readers are used to hearing about the exotic and abstruse aspects of mathematics - shapes that exist in 196,000 dimensions, the hunt for far-flung prime numbers, or the strange equations that describe quantum theory. There's nothing wrong with any of that, but information theorist and mathematician Oliver Johnson is interested in using maths to understand things that are much closer to home. During the pandemic he has written regularly for numerous newspapers on the subject of using mathematical thinking to understand change in the world - from the exponential spread of viruses, to the rise of filter bubbles (and how to use information theory to escape from them); from changes in share price, to the way rumours spread. This is a book about how mathematicians think and look at the world; about maths as a practical toolkit, and about the relationship between mathematical models and life - and all without a single equation.

How to Think like a Mathematician is a wonderfully lucid and entertaining book, which will do for mathematics what Frank Wilczek's Fundamentals has done for the beautiful basics of physics.