Why do mobile phones work when you're on a train? What happens when you pull a pop song apart into pure sine waves and play it back on a piano? And what did mathematicians have to do with the great pig stampede of 2012? The answer to each of these questions can be found in the triangle.

Humans have been using triangles for thousands of years to build structures, measure the earth, make music, paint vanishing points, pot snooker balls and much, much more. But trigonometry is not a thing of the...

NAMED A MOST-ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024 BY THE FT, THE GUARDIAN, AND THE SUNDAY TIMES

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Signal and the Noise, the definitive guide to our era of risk―and the players raising the stakes

In the bestselling The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver showed how forecasting would define the age of Big Data. Now, in this timely and riveting new book, Silver investigates "The River," or those whose mastery of risk allows them to shape―and dominate―so mu...

Machine-learning systems are making life-altering decisions for us: approving mortgage loans, determining whether a tumour is cancerous, or deciding whether someone gets bail. They now influence discoveries in chemistry, biology and physics - the study of genomes, extra-solar planets, even the intricacies of quantum systems.

We are living through a revolution in artificial intelligence that is not slowing down. This major shift is based on simple mathematics, some of which goes back centuries...