The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Maths

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Physicist Eugene Wigner, who was a Nobel laureate, talked about the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics at describing everything in our physical universe. It’s so good at modeling physics and what have you. Could it be that math is really the true driving force of the universe? Rather than us just inventing it and using it to describe the universe, could the universe really be describing mathematics? Then the universe is just a physical manifestation, an approximation, if you will, of those mathematical ideas. It’s a completely different view of math. In this new mathematical origin story, mathematician and novelist Manil Suri creates a natural progression of ideas needed to design our world, starting with numbers and continuing through geometry, algebra, and beyond. He reveals the secret lives of real and imaginary numbers, teaches them to play abstract games with real-world applications, discovers unexpected patterns that connect humble lifeforms to enormous galaxies, and explores mathematical underpinnings for randomness and beauty. With evocative examples ranging from multidimensional crochet to the Mona Lisa’s asymmetrical smile, as well as ingenious storytelling that helps illuminate complex concepts like infinity and relativity, The Big Bang of Numbers charts a playful, inventive course to existence. Mathematics, Suri shows, might best be understood not as something we invent to explain Nature, but as the source of all creation, whose directives Nature tries to obey as best she can. The aim of my book is to challenge the popular notion that mathematics is synonymous with calculation. Starting with arithmetic and proceeding through algebra and beyond, the message drummed into our heads as students is that we do math to ‘get the right answer.’ The drill of multiplication tables, the drudgery of long division, the quadratic formula and its memorization – these are the dreary memories many of us carry around from school as a result.

Distilled from almost four decades of teaching experience, and offering both striking new perspectives for maths aficionados and an accessible introduction for enthusiastic novices, The Big Bang of Numbers proves that we can all fall in love with maths. There’s an ongoing debate over whether math is something that people invented or whether it’s something that exists independently of us. In the book, you say that perhaps the deepest insight that math can offer us is that it’s both of those things. So my thought was, both these areas, religion and physics, are in the public’s imagination much more than mathematics is. Is there a way to posit math as the creative force of everything?

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The creation of numbers initially is very abstract, however the author then leads the reader through a natural evolution of the number system. From natural (counting numbers) we develop integers (positive and negative numbers), on to rational numbers (fractions and decimals) and then irrational numbers (such as pi). The concept of imaginary numbers is introduced in a very accessible way. That’s a cornerstone of many religions where God creates the universe out of nothing. It’s also in some sense being explored by physicists, where you have some sort of singularity and from that, everything emerges in the Big Bang. It was the closest I’ve been to a religious experience, almost like the walls just dissolved and suddenly there were numbers everywhere. A. Before the 1990s, there were two ideas. Either gravity would slow down the universe’s expansion and eventually reverse it – leading to a big crunch. Or the universe would keep on expanding forever. When astronomers finally had the technology to measure how the universe’s expansion was changing they discovered that expansion was speeding up. They named whatever was pushing the galaxies away from each other dark energy. Accelerating expansion could lead to two grim outcomes. Either we end up in a big freeze, where even the light from other galaxies won’t be able to reach us. Or we experience a big rip, where the violent acceleration rips apart all matter and trace of anything having ever existed. Much of math as seen in nature is an approximation of theory (Cloud boundaries and trees approximating fractals based on infinity).

With evocative and engaging examples ranging from multidimensional crochet to the Mona Lisa’s asymmetrical smile, as well as ingenious storytelling that helps illuminate complex concepts like infinity and relativity, The Big Bang of Numbers charts a playful, inventive course to existence,” writes the Deccan Herald, which named the book its “read of the week” in mid-October . Much of math is built through the combination of axioms, thought to be self-evident facts/observations, into more complex ideas. As long as the axioms hold, the ideas that are built from them will as well.

In the end, it took measurements not theories to finally convince many scientists that we live in an expanding universe. Astronomer Edwin Hubble was already world famous for discovering that our galaxy is not the only one. His later observations in 1929 proved that all galaxies are moving away from us and moving faster the further away they are. Space itself is expanding. It started going into a more philosophical realm when a writing teacher said, you know, Vishnu is also the name of the caretaker of the universe in Hindu mythology. So if you name somebody Vishnu, you need to somehow explore that. So that’s what opened up this whole new world for me.

A beautifully written meditation on whimsical, thought-provoking and deep ' ALEX BELLOS, author of Alex's Adventures in Numberland In this new mathematical origin story, mathematician and novelist Manil Suri creates a natural progression of ideas needed to design our world, starting with numbers and continuing through geometry, algebra, and beyond. He reveals the secret lives of real and imaginary numbers, teaches them to play abstract games with real-world applications, discovers unexpected patterns that connect humble lifeforms to enormous galaxies, and explores mathematical underpinnings for randomness and beauty. With evocative examples ranging from multidimensional crochet to the Mona Lisa’s asymmetrical smile, as well as ingenious storytelling that helps illuminate complex concepts like infinity and relativity, The Big Bang of Numberscharts a playful, inventive course to existence. Mathematics, Suri shows, might best be understood not as something we invent to explain Nature, but as the source of all creation, whose directives Nature tries to obey as best she can. With The Big Bang of Numbers, which the Wall Street Journal has called “imaginative and organized,” Suri isn’t just seeking to help a wider audience understand or feel comfortable with math, but feel a sense of fascination with it. According to the Mathematical Association of America, Suri’s approach—rich in humor and narrative elements—goes beyond “simply telling the reader about these ideas”; instead, he “allow[s] readers to experience the attitude of curious exploration that attracts mathematicians to the discipline, but is often absent from low-level math classes.” For mathematicians, I suspect the most appealing characteristic of the subject is its playfulness,” Suri told Frontline. “Maths is a game in which you start with a bunch of rules and then deduce away to see where you can get. You can play it anywhere—in the shower, on the bus, while eating lunch—all you need is your mind.” Manil Suri participated in the Bellagio residency program in 2016. During this residency, he worked on The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math (WW Norton, 2022). Manil is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and author of three novels, including The Death of Vishnu . He is a former contributing opinion writer at the New York Times.The second book was “ The Age of Shiva.” That one’s the journey of a woman right after India’s independence in 1947. She’s making her way in a very male-dominated world, and she’s not perfect. And I said, well, can you go further? You can create the numbers, but can you actually start building everything, including the whole universe from that? So that was a way to try to lay out mathematics almost as a story where one thing follows from the other and everything is embedded in one narrative. When I arrived for my residency, I was in the midst of an earlier version, which was written as a novel. After finishing that, I rewrote the entire book as non-fiction. I shaped the section on patterns at Bellagio, especially how so-called ‘fractals’ occur in nature. The fact they are both invisible explains why the universe appears to be a lot lighter than it should be. In fact, we now think that about 68% of the universe is dark energy and 27% is dark matter. But knowing what dark energy and dark matter actually are will give us a much better understanding of what went on during the big bang. Our universe has multiple origin stories, from religious creation myths to the Big Bang of scientists. But if we leave those behind and start from nothing—no matter, no cosmos, not even empty space—could we create a universe using only math? Irreverent, richly illustrated, and boundlessly creative, The Big Bang of Numbersinvites us to try.