Is mathematics a discovery or an invention? Numbers have always been a way of understanding and ordering the world, from sacred ancient texts and pre-Socratic philosophers to 20th-century logician Bertrand Russell and beyond. In this masterful, elegant survey, Paolo Zellini offers a brief cultural and intellectual history of mathematics, encompassing ancient Greece, India, and our contemporary obsession with algorithms. As Zellini demonstrates, mathematical thinking is inextricably linked with philosophical, existential, and religious questions—and indeed with our cosmic understanding of the world.