The Best Writing on Mathematics 2021

The years finest mathematical writing from around the world

This annual anthology brings together the years finest mathematics writing from around the worldand you dont need to be a mathematician to enjoy the pieces collected here. These essaysfrom leading names and fresh new voicesdelve into the history, philosophy, teaching, and everyday aspects of math, offering surprising insights into its nature, meaning, and practice, and taking readers behind the scenes of todays hottest mathematical debates.

Here, Viktor Blåsjö gives a brief history of lockdown mathematics; Yelda Nasifoglu decodes the politics of a seventeenth-century play in which the characters are geometric shapes; and Andrew Lewis-Pye explains the basic algorithmic rules and computational procedures behind cryptocurrencies. In other essays, Terence Tao candidly recalls the adventures and misadventures of growing up to become a leading mathematician; Natalie Wolchover shows how old math gives new clues about whether time really flows; and David Hand discusses the problem of dark datainformation that is missing or ignored. And there is much, much more.