Benjamin Wardhaugh is a historian and writer. He is the author of several successful books about mathematics, music, and history. His anthology of popular mathematics writing A Wealth of Numbers was called ‘a unique book that is equal to far more than the sum of its parts’ by Paul C. Pasles. His Poor Robin’s Prophecies, an account of the wonderful world of popular mathematics in eighteenth-century Britain, also impressed reviewers, with Patricia Fara judging it ‘Delightfully chatty and informative’.
Gunpowder and Geometry is a gripping account of the life of Charles Hutton: pit boy, mathematician and scientific rebel; it was simply ‘a brilliant job’ according to the Northern Echo, and was one of the Telegraph’s books of the year. And Benjamin’s latest book, The Book of Wonders / Encounters with Euclid traces the story of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry from ancient Greece to the present day; it was shortlisted for the 2020 London Hellenic Prize and has been translated into German, Italian and Spanish. Ian Stewart calls it ‘astonishingly readable and informative’.
Benjamin’s latest book is Counting: Humans, History, and the Infinite Lives of Numbers. An innovative, erudite, world-wrapping journey through humanity’s marvellous ability to impose numbers on things, the book draws on stories from the Stone Age to cyberspace in pursuit of the elusive, fascinating, endlessly diverse history of human counting.
