The Secret Lives of Numbers

A delightful journey through some of the lesser known highways and byways of mathematics that brings to the fore many fascinating figures who have been unjustly forgotten. A treasury of lost historical tales where you can find the story of a Keralan mathematician who might have discovered calculus centuries before Newton and Leibniz or the eleventh-century Chinese origins of binary in the I Ching

Ananyo Bhattacharya, author of The Man from the Future

Modern technology is built on the work of those who pursued maths for maths' sake. This book is a clever tribute to those brilliant, if sometimes erratic, lives

Tom Calver, The Sunday Times

A delightful journey through some of the lesser known highways and byways of mathematics

Ananyo Bhattacharya, author of The Man from the Future

Great and highly accessible read – even for the less numerically gifted

i, ‘Top Non-Fiction’

Lively, satisfying, good at explaining difficult concepts

The Sunday Times

The history of math is typically taught from an exclusively Greco-Eurocentric perspective as a parade of great men. This significantly distorts reality. Mathematics has been invented in one form or another by every culture on Earth, and the exclusion of women and people of color from traditional narratives is particularly glaring. Kitagawa and Revell do an excellent job of broadening our view to the far more vibrant, collaborative, diverse, and interesting history . . . Mathematics is the most powerful tool humans ever invented, and this book is a welcome corrective to our understanding of how it came to be

Kirkus, starred review