Heligo Books signs ‘revelatory’ pop-maths title from mathematician Johnson   

Heligo Books, the business and smart-thinking imprint of Bonnier Books UK, has signed a “riveting, revelatory and relevant” new pop-maths book by mathematician Oliver Johnson.

Rik Ubhi, editorial director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, to Numbercrunch: A Mathematician’s Toolkit for Making Sense of Your World from Will Francis at Janklow & Nesbit UK.  It will be published in hardback, e-book and audio on 2nd March 2023.

According to the publisher, Numbercrunch equips readers with the mathematical tools and thinking to understand the myriad data all around us.

“It covers the exponential growth of viruses and social media filter-bubbles, share-price fluctuations and the growth of computing power, the datafication of our sports pages and the quantification of climate change,” the synopsis continues. “Not to mention those questions a bit closer to home, such as when is it statistically the right time to leave a party? What can we learn from millions of retweets about chicken nuggets? And how improbable is it for Aston Villa to have beaten Liverpool 7-2?”

Oliver Johnson is a professor of information theory and director of the Institute for Statistical Science in the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol. He was previously a research fellow at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge.

He said: “It was a rewarding challenge to distil down the daily pandemic data for a Twitter audience over lockdown. With the publication of Numbercrunch, I am excited to be sharing even more stories about the way that mathematical ideas can help us all make sense of daily life.”

Ubhi said: “As an admirer of Oliver’s number-crunching on Twitter, I leapt at the opportunity to publish this riveting, revelatory and relevant book.

“Oliver has the rare gift of being able to break down complex ideas in a way that not only makes them understandable to the rest of us, but also fun and entertaining. Numbercrunch shows that maths isn’t esoteric but embedded in the everyday. It is statistics by stealth – and just what we need in this age of information overload. I can’t wait for this book to captivate readers upon publication next March.”