This highly accessible book on the particularities and wider ramifications of mathematics resulted from a series of lectures given by the author in 1991. John Barrow reviews here some recent developments in the study of complex and chaotic systems. He also takes a look at the emergence of counting systems and of the first words used to designate numbers in early cultures and in Antiquity, and examines different philosophical positions on nature, the omnipresence of mathematics and their use.


John D. Barrow is Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge University. Until 1999, he was the Director of the Astronomy Centre at the University of Sussex. He is the author of many books, including Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits.