Our modern world is built on mathematics, from social media algorithms, package delivery and weather forecasting to medical imaging and machine learning. The rise of computers helped increase their dominance and allowed us to work with ever larger numbers that would otherwise exceed the capacity of our limited human brains. But with the advent of large language models, AI chatbots, and soon quantum computing, so-called “big mathematics” is beginning to completely outpace its creators. What that means and how we might adapt is the focus of a new book. Big Math: The hidden codes that govern our worldby applied mathematicians Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend.
Strogatz is perhaps best known in his field for his co-authorship with Duncan Watts in 1998 of a groundbreaking paper on the collective dynamics of small-world networks. He has also studied chaos theory as it applies to physics, the geometry of supercoiled DNA, and biological collective oscillators such as swarms of synchronously flashing fireflies and crickets chirping in unison. In 2005, Strogatz expanded his study of synchronicity to the crowds that caused London’s Millennium Bridge to shake.
An award-winning communicator, Strogatz wrote three series of columns on mathematics for The New York Times in 2010, 2012 and 2025 and hosted a podcast for Quanta Magazine from 2020 to 2021. He has written four popular books: Synchronize (2003), The calculation of friendship (2009), The Joy of X (2012) and the New York Times bestseller Infinite powers (2019).
This time, Strogatz found a well-suited co-author in Townsend, a younger colleague recently hired at Cornell who works on numerical analysis and deep learning. As a senior lecturer, Strogatz was assigned Townsend as a mentor, and the two men began regularly eating lunch together in Risley Hall. Strogatz was intrigued by the potential of Townsend’s course on the 20 best algorithms of the 20th century as a popular book and suggested co-authorship. This concept slowly became a book about large matrix calculations and then what that became Great mathematics.
“There are as many books about pure mathematics as if there were no computers,” Strogatz told Ars. “Alex and I are both very applied mathematicians. We thought there should be a book about computers and mathematics, especially the class of really big problems with billions of variables or parameters that you just can’t solve in your head. A lot of the mathematics we’ve had for centuries translates perfectly to the age of computers. What the abacus did for arithmetic, that fangcheng (“rectangular array”) used for systems of linear equations. It was a matrix that could be manipulated with your hand and bamboo sticks. So this externalization of mathematics from our heads into our tools is a 2,000-year-old idea.”
