Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, with a program that not only

makes friends with statistics but wants you to be friends with them too.

And I'm Tim Haferd.

Today we've set ourselves a challenge to not mention a single number.

That's because I've interviewed Milo Beckman, a young mathematician still in his 20s who's

written a book called Math Without Numbers.

Milo started high school maths aged 8 and by 16...

I think challenge failed immediately.

Anyway, by 16 he'd graduated from Harvard.

He tried his hand at finance but now has a real job, teaching and writing.

I started by asking him why he attempted such a thing, writing a maths book with no numbers.

I really wanted to reclaim the word math because I think people are always confused and

I say things like I love math because they're thinking of like times tables or you know

whatever standardized tests and I think there is this idea in our culture, definitely

in the US.

I think also just in the West broadly that math is like this hurdle that you have to jump

over, you have to sort of get past in order to graduate in order to have the job you want,

whatever it is.

And for me math was always just this beautiful way of thinking about things, it's all about

these concepts, things like symmetry, infinity dimensions.

And actually when you get pretty far into the math curriculum, you really stop seeing numbers.

That was something that occurred to me, there was one day when I was like in a math class,

...