Who knew numbers could be so charming? ... Suri takes us on a light-hearted journey all the way from nothing (zero) to infinity' Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves 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.” 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.

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. 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. How do we know all this? General relativity describes how space, time and gravity work throughout the universe. Albert Einstein came up with the ground breaking theory in 1915. But it was another physicist, Alexander Friedmann, who studied the equations and made a startling discovery.The Big Bang of Numbers was shortlisted for the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Manil Suri speaks at GRIT-X, an event during UMBC’s Homecoming festivities, in 2018. Math as a game 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. Suri, a novelist and mathematics professor, notes that while physics and religion can offer some answers to many big questions—“Why is the universe the way it is? How do we fit in? The two camps have been duking it out over the answers for centuries”—mathematics offers concrete solutions. In the popular mind, math equals calculation: very useful, very dull. By contrast, writes the author, “we will view mathematics as the fundamental source of creation, with reality trying to follow its dictates as best it can.” Religions have explained the origin and evolution of the universe since the dawn of history; during the last century, physicists chimed in with the Big Bang and other theories. Suri proposes to do the same with math, and readers who pay attention will agree that he is on to something. The essence of math is not counting but measuring, and nothing measurable existed before the Big Bang. You can’t determine where the Big Bang occurred because that was also when space began. In the beginning were numbers, and all were created equal, which turns out to be less simple than it sounds. Numbers can be natural (1, 2, 3…), rational (including some fractions), or irrational (pi, one the square root of 2). All these are real, but unreal (i.e. imaginary) numbers like the square root of -1 also exist, and they’re genuinely useful in many areas of science and engineering. Although Suri does not fully construct the universe, he successfully explores many areas of seemingly pure math that explain the natural world, from the shapes of galaxies and living creatures to weather, gravity, beauty, and even art. He also sheds light on abstruse subjects (fractals, infinity, curved space) that puzzle humans more than they should, creating a text that is deeper than most popular writing on math but worth the effort. 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.

In his role as math professor, Suri works hard to convince his students that math doesn’t just matter, it is also endlessly interesting—extending his instruction well beyond the basics of calculations and into the field’s fundamental ideas. Once numbers have been created we then move on to how geometry would develop. Where possible practical examples are given to illustrate ideas, I particularly liked the use of crochet to explain the hyperbolic plane.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. Patterns in nature, like the triangles on this shell, can be explained by simple mathematical rules. Larry Cole Manil Suri speaks about The Big Bang of Numbers at a special event to mark the book’s publication and success on November 14 at UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery. A new challenge

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 the end, according to Suri’s book, math is a “force that forever enthralls, not just through the answers it gives but also through the new mysteries it poses.” But he hopes his readers will also understand math as a game. 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?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. 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.