Richard Elwes is an associate professor of mathematics at University of Leeds in the UK, where he has taught subjects including mathematical logic and the history of mathematics. He is the author of six popular maths books including Huge Numbers.
In this extract from Richard Elwes' new book Huge Numbers, he delves into the Mayan numeral system and their understanding of time.
For years, scientists and science fiction writers have contemplated the possibilities of higher dimensional spaces. What would a 4- or 5-dimensional universe look like?
Winner of the general public category. Enormous is the right word: this theorem's proof spans over 10,000 pages in 500 journal articles and no-one today understands all its details. So what does the theorem say? Richard Elwes has a short and sweet introduction.
