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

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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.

Friedmann found that relativity naturally describes a cosmos that is either expanding or shrinking. One possibility he considered was that everything we observe today expanded from a single infinitely dense point. Published in 1922, Friedmann’s work was largely ignored. Five years later, history repeated itself. Belgian priest and astronomer Georges Lemaître did the maths again and concluded that our universe mushroomed from a 'primeval atom'. Just like Friedmann, Lemaître was ignored. After you set off your Big Bang of numbers, you dig in to some of life’s big questions. What do you see as math’s role in grappling with those big thoughts, like where the universe came from, why we even exist and so on?

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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 Numbers invites us to try. Overall this is an interesting addition to the genre of popular science. More philosophical argument than mathematical text. You do not need an advanced maths qualification to get something out of The Big Bang Of Numbers, however you do need to be comfortable using numbers. 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. Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator. I don't read much non-fiction but when I do it tends to be science based. Having taught Maths at secondary school level (11 to 16 years old) for 35 years I was tempted by the claim that The Big Bang Of Numbers is for "maths aficionados and an accessible introduction for enthusiastic novices".

Once I started writing my novels, I was meeting a lot of people who were artists and writers. And they would always say, you know, we used to love math when we were in school, but afterward we never had a chance to really pursue it. And can you tell us something about your mathematics? 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. There’s just so much joy to be had out of mathematics, so many things that you don’t really see in normal courses where the emphasis is always on doing the calculations, finding the right answer. So this book is written for people who want to really engage with mathematics on the level of ideas rather than get into computations and calculations. Usually math is thought of as something that we invent, perhaps, to explain things around us. I’m kind of reversing this perspective and saying that math is the true driver of the universe, and the universe itself is a model of the mathematical principles,” Suri recently told NPR’s Marketplace.

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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. We are all familiar with the creation theories given by religion or physics. Manil Suri approaches creation from the perspective of numbers. He starts by simply asking where numbers come from? From a creation point of view this isn't as easy to answer as you would first think. If nothing exists numbers don't develop as a means of counting objects (since objects don't exist).

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? 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. A vastly different approach to math than I've experienced prior. Suri introduces the thought experiment of building the universe using math only (as opposed to theology, or physics, as most of our known origin stories do). In doing so, Suri reveals the deep intuition that underpins many of maths concepts, and the fascinating relationships that exist between its disciplines. Then the third one, I decided, OK, I need to put in some science and math characters. So “ The City of Devi” actually has both a physicist and a statistician. Again it’s in Mumbai, set in the future with the threat of a nuclear war with Pakistan and a love triangle unfolding in front of that. 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.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.