Nature reviews Big Math, a book on mathematics and AI

Book review

Nature has published a book review of Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World by mathematicians Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend, published by Little, Brown and Company in 2026. The review, written by Anil Ananthaswamy, appeared on 09 November 2026 in Nature 659, 294-296.

The review describes the book as a portrait of the ways mathematics underpins almost every aspect of people’s lives. The authors call this “big math” — the mathematics behind technologies that are “shaking the foundations of how we work, how we play, how we learn, how we shop and travel and communicate, even how we heal”.

Historical examples in the book

The review recounts several historical examples from the book:

• Chinese mathematicians solved accounting problems to estimate the edible rice yield expected from bundles of unprocessed rice still in the husk, a problem expressible as a system of linear equations, matrices, and vectors.
• Nineteenth-century mathematician James Joseph Sylvester coined the term “matrix” and thought of it as a “mother, a generator, an entity that gave birth to other mathematical objects”.
• Leon Festinger’s 1949 idea that repeated matrix–vector multiplications can uncover “hidden structures in social networks”.
• The board game Snakes and Ladders can be used to understand a Markov chain, a mathematical formulation key to Google’s early search algorithms.
• George Dantzig, as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1939, arrived late to a statistics class, saw two equations on the blackboard, and solved them, believing they were homework assignments; they were open, unsolved problems.

AI and mathematics

The review states that artificial-intelligence tools have found solutions to several mathematics and physics problems that had been unresolved for years. It also notes that the manipulation of massive matrices, with hundreds of billions and even trillions of numbers, is at the heart of generative AI.

The book includes the story of Regina Barzilay, a computer scientist who had breast cancer and, after finishing treatment in 2014, collaborated with radiologists and computer scientists to develop a machine-learning model that could predict a person’s risk of developing breast cancer within the next five years from a single mammogram.

The authors warn that their aim is not to make maths “cozy or accessible”.

Why it matters

The review situates the book within a tradition of maths writing that includes Strogatz’s The Joy of X (2012) and Infinite Powers (2019), Leonard Susskind’s Theoretical Minimum series, and Sean Carroll’s The Biggest Ideas in the Universe series. The review notes that Big Math is light on equations, making it more accessible than some of those works, while still revealing the extent to which maths has permeated people’s lives, for better and for worse.

Sources

• nature.com: AI has transformed maths — this is how we got here | Nature

This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.