Big Math

It‘s in every photo you post to Instagram, every Google search you make and every prompt you give to ChatGPT . . . Big Math - the branch of modern mathematics behind our digital revolution - operates under the hood of these everyday miracles, driving the biggest shifts in how we shop, communicate, live, and think. Yet the arithmetic itself is not especially new or mysterious: rather, it is made up of humble concepts and processes such as matrices and vectors, networks and Markov Chains, optimization and linear algebra. These basic concepts are the cornerstone of computer science and quantum computing, and they‘re crucial for aspiring tech workers and ordinary citizens alike to understand if we‘re to comprehend the changes sweeping the world. The story of how this little math grew so large, and how it became central to our modern lives, is also one of the great intellectual adventures of all time, with precursors in a bamboo puzzle book in an ancient Chinese tomb and inheritance law in ninth-century Baghdad. But after a long history of working harmoniously with humans, today this reliable branch of mathematics has slipped the leash. As Big Math has expanded to contend with ever larger problems and ever vaster sets of data, it has also begun to operate in ways that we don‘t comprehend. Celebrated mathematicians Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend ask: what happens when Big Math outgrows us - when it becomes something we no longer understand, only something we witness? And what if it no longer needs us at all?