Milo Beckman + Charlie Bardey: Math Without Numbers

Join us for an event with author and educator Milo Beckman, discussing his book Math Without Numbers. Joining Milo in conversation is comedian Charlie Bardey. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

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An illustrated tour of the structures and patterns we call "math"

The only numbers in this book are the page numbers.

Math Without Numbers is a vivid, conversational, and wholly original guide to the three main branches of abstract math—topology, analysis, and algebra—which turn out to be surprisingly easy to grasp. This book upends the conventional approach to math, inviting you to think creatively about shape and dimension, the infinite and infinitesimal, symmetries, proofs, and how these concepts all fit together. What awaits readers is a freewheeling tour of the inimitable joys and unsolved mysteries of this curiously powerful subject.

Like the classic math allegory Flatland, first published over a century ago, or Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach forty years ago, there has never been a math book quite like Math Without Numbers. So many popularizations of math have dwelt on numbers like pi or zero or infinity. This book goes well beyond questions such as: How many shapes are there? Is anything bigger than infinity? And is math even true? Milo Beckman shows why math is mostly just pattern recognition and how it keeps on surprising us with unexpected, useful connections to the real world.

The ambitions of this book take a special kind of author. An inventive, original thinker pursuing his calling with jubilant passion. A prodigy. Milo Beckman completed the graduate-level course sequence in mathematics at age sixteen, when he was a sophomore at Harvard; while writing this book, he was studying the philosophical foundations of physics at Columbia under Brian Greene, among others.

Photo credit: Jordan Ashleigh

Milo Beckman is an author and educator from New York. His debut book Math Without Numbers was published in 2021.

Born in Manhattan in 1995, Milo captained the New York City Math Team and wrote crossword puzzles for the New York Times before enrolling at Harvard at age fifteen. After brief stints working in finance, tech, government, and journalism, he retired to focus on research and writing. His diverse projects have been featured in FiveThirtyEight, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Times of London, Huffington Post, Good Morning America, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. He holds an M.A. in Philosophical Foundations of Physics from Columbia and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Philosophy.

Photo credit: Samantha Rae Brooks

Charlie Bardey is a writer, comedian, and math tutor based in New York City. He's been named one of Vulture Magazine's Comedians You Should and Will Know, and hosts the cult-hit podcast Exploration: LIVE!.

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