At Bloomsbury in London, thanks to Bill Swainson, Alison Glossop, Laura Brooke, Helen Flood, Amanda Shipp, Greg Heinimann, David Mann, Richard Atkinson, and especially Xa Shaw Stewart for meticulously overseeing every fraction and exponent. At Simon & Schuster in New York: Ben Loehnen, Emily Loose and Brit Hvide, and at Doubleday in Toronto: Tim Rostron.
Ben Sumner was a demon copyeditor, and Edmund Harriss, Yin-Fung Au, June Barrow-Green, Erica Jarnes and Gareth Roberts provided invaluable comments on the text. Thanks also to Simon Lindo for the illustrations, The Surreal McCoy for the cartoons and Susan Wightman at Libanus Press for the design and typesetting.
I relied on interviews and correspondences with many people, and I am sincerely grateful for the time they gave me.
Chapter One: Jerry Newport, Greg Rowland, Manoj Thomas, Terence Hines, Jim Wilkie, Husam E. Sadig, Saffi Haines, Dan King, Tom Dearden, Jer Thorp, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Francesca Rochberg, Richard Wiseman, David Marks, Sophie Scott, Stephen Macknik, Peter Lynn, Yutaka Nishiyama, Robert Schindler.
Chaper Two: Will Rennie, Jialan Wang, Ted Hill, Erika Rogers, Darrell Dorrell, Albert-László Barabási, David Hand, Walter Mebane, Christiane Fellbaum, Jure Leskovec, Geoffrey B. West, Pete Whitelock.
Chapter Three: Michalis Sialaros, Apostolos Doxiadis, Mark Greaves, Robert Woodall, John Keay, Darran Shepherd.
Chapter Four: Ramiro Serra, Ron Doerfler, Ian Dickerson, Silvia Pezzana, Art P. Frigo Jr.
Chapter Five: Bob Whitaker, Ivan Moscovich, Tom Armstrong, Brett Crockett, John Whitney Jr., Karl Sims.
Chapter Six: Andrew Smith, Roger Ridsdill Smith, Nikolai Malsch, Albert Bartlett, Tim Harford, Stan Wagon.
Chapter Seven: John Baez, David Tong, Dave Makin, Brian Pollock, Cliff Pickover, Daniel White, Orson Wang, Robert L. Devaney.
Chapter Eight: Peter Hopp, Bill Thacker, John Wardley, Werner Stengel, Cédric Villani, Franki Dillen, Hartosh Bal.
Chapter Nine: Alex Paseau, Jim Holt, Norman Megill, Lawrence Paulson, Nathaniel Johnston.
Chapter Ten: Tom Rokicki, Adam P. Goucher, Tim Hutton, Paul Chapman, Dave Green, Adam Rutherford, Stefanie Prather, Jean Buck, Stephen Wolfram, Bill Gosper, Andy Adamatzky, Tim Hutton, Nick Gotts, John Conway, Craig Lent, Doug Tougaw.
I feel extremely fortunate to be represented by Janklow & Nesbit. Thanks to my agent Rebecca Carter and her colleagues Rebecca Folland, Kirsty Gordon, Lynn Nesbit and Claire Paterson.
Friends and family have generously provided help when called upon, from moral support to mathematical clarifications to the use of a Paris flat: Gavin Pretor-Pinney, Hugh Morison, Cliff Pickover, Graham Farmelo, James Grime, Colin Wright, Cordelia Jenkins, Francesca Segal, Roger Highfield and Simon Kuper. Thanks to my parents David Bellos and Ilona Morison for their unceasing encouragement and faith, and most of all to my wife Natalie for her many contributions to this book and the happiness of its author.
I mentioned my niece at the end of the acknowledgements of Alex’s Adventures in Numberland in return for her doing well at her Maths A-level. She now gets a name check for her decision to study Mathematics and Psychology at university. Go Zara!