av福利社

This annual anthology brings together the year鈥檚 finest mathematics writing from around the world鈥攁nd you don鈥檛 need to be a mathematician to enjoy the pieces collected here. These essays鈥攆rom leading names and fresh new voices鈥攄elve into the history, philosophy, teaching, and everyday aspects of math, offering surprising insights into its nature, meaning, and practice, and taking readers behind the scenes of today鈥檚 hottest mathematical debates.

Here, Viktor Bl氓sj枚 gives a brief history of 鈥渓ockdown mathematics鈥�; Yelda Nasifoglu decodes the politics of a seventeenth-century play in which the characters are geometric shapes; and Andrew Lewis-Pye explains the basic algorithmic rules and computational procedures behind cryptocurrencies. In other essays, Terence Tao candidly recalls the adventures and misadventures of growing up to become a leading mathematician; Natalie Wolchover shows how old math gives new clues about whether time really flows; and David Hand discusses the problem of 鈥渄ark data鈥濃�攊nformation that is missing or ignored. And there is much, much more.