The Number Mysteries cover art

The Number Mysteries

A Mathematical Odyssey Through Everyday Life

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About this listen

From the author of ‘The Music of the Primes’ and ‘Finding Moonshine’ comes a short, lively book on five mathematical problems that just refuse be solved – and on how many everyday problems can be solved by maths.

Every time we download a song from Itunes, take a flight across the Atlantic or talk on our mobile phones, we are relying on great mathematical inventions. Maths may fail to provide answers to various of its own problems, but it can provide answers to problems that don't seem to be its own – how prime numbers are the key to Real Madrid's success, to secrets on the Internet and to the survival of insects in the forests of North America.

In ‘The Number Mysteries’, Marcus du Sautoy explains how to fake a Jackson Pollock; how to work out whether or not the universe has a hole in the middle of it; how to make the world's roundest football. He shows us how to see shapes in four dimensions – and how maths makes you a better gambler. He tells us about the quest to predict the future – from the flight of asteroids to an impending storm, from bending a ball like Beckham to predicting population growth.

It's a book to dip in to; a book to challenge and puzzle – and a book that gives us answers.

©2019 Marcus du Sautoy (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers Limited Mathematics Sports Technology

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Critic reviews

'Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford university maths professor and holder of the Simonyi chair for the public understanding of science…digs up the unusual places where maths lurks in the real world…it's a hard task making the world of maths accessible and intriguing to the general public…Du Sautoy manages it well…covering everything from internet credit-card security to the maths behind making the roundest football, he builds a persuasive case for how relevant these mathematical mysteries are to our everyday lives' Sunday Times
I have really enjoyed other works by Marcus, but this audible version is a flop. I doubt that even an excellent narrator could save it, but this chap sounds as bored and exasperated reading it as I was in listening to it. I could not stand more than an hour but perhaps you’ll do better. A shame because the narrative has real interest, but hearing ‘1 is a horizontal line, 2 is 2 horizontal lines, 3 is 3 horizontal lines’ ad nauseum is description not narration.

About as enthralling as a reading of the phone book

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