The book will be published with Heligo Books, the business and smart-thinking imprint from Bonnier Books UK. Numbercrunch is aimed at a general audience, and will be published as hardback, ebook and audiobook on 3 March.

Numbercrunch equips readers with the mathematical tools and thinking to understand the myriad data all around us. It covers the exponential growth of viruses and social media filter-bubbles, share-price fluctuations and the growth of computing power, the datafication of our sports pages and the quantification of climate change. Not to mention those questions a bit closer to home, such as when is it statistically the right time to leave a party? What can we learn from millions of retweets about chicken nuggets? And how improbable is it for Aston Villa to have beaten Liverpool 7-2? 

Oliver Johnson is Professor of Information Theory and Director of the Institute for Statistical Science in the School of Mathematics. He has frequently appeared on Radio 4’s PM, has written for the Spectator, and been quoted in a variety of outlets including The Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph and New York Times. Oliver is on Twitter as @BristOliver, where he has an engaged following of almost 45k followers and tweets about maths, music, and Aston Villa.