In today’s data-driven world, maths is a weapon wielded by banks, insurance companies, tech firms, and government agencies. These organizations use sophisticated algorithms to calculate odds, make predictions, uncover patterns, manage risk, and optimize actions. And they treat you as another number to crunch along the way.

Robin Hood Maths explains the mathematical methods these companies and agencies use to manipulate and profit off of you. It’s easy to assume these algorithms are too complex to even understand, let alone use for yourself. But maths professor Noah Giansiracusa makes the compelling case that anyone can use these same methods, without any special training or advanced knowledge. He offers simple hacks and streamlined formulas for beating the number crunchers at their own game.

With Professor Giansiracusa as your guide, you’ll learn how to use maths to rescue your credit score and make better investments, take control of your social media, and reclaim agency over the decisions you make every day. In a society designed to take from the poor and give to the rich, maths has the potential to be a powerful democratizing force. Robin Hood Maths gives you the tools you need to think for yourself, act in your own best interest, and thrive.

From an acclaimed Wall Street Journal reporter comes the first biography of the enigmatic leader of the AI revolution, charting his ascent within the tech world as well as his ambitions for this powerful new technology.

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot that captivated the world with its uncanny ability to hold humanlike conversations. Not even a year later, on November 17, 2023, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was summarily fired on a video call by the company’s board. The firing made headlines around the globe: OpenAI is the leader in the race to build AGI―artificial general intelligence, or AI that can think like a human being―and Altman is the most prominent figure in the field. Yet it was mere days before Altman was back running the company he had co-founded, with most of the directors who voted to fire him themselves removed from the board.

The episode was a demonstration of how quickly the industry is moving, and of Altman’s power to bend reality to his will. In The Optimist, the Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey presents the most detailed account yet of Altman’s rise, from his precocious childhood in St. Louis to his first, failed startup experience; his time as legendary entrepreneur Paul Graham’s protégé and successor as head of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator where Altman became the premier power broker in Silicon Valley; the founding of OpenAI and his recruitment of a small yet superior team; and his struggle to keep his company at the cutting edge while fending off determined rivals, including Elon Musk, a former friend and now Altman’s bitter opponent.

Hagey conducted more than 250 interviews, with Altman’s family, friends, teachers, mentors, co-founders, colleagues, investors, and portfolio companies, in addition to spending hours with Altman himself. The person who emerges in her portrait is a brilliant dealmaker with a love of risk, who believes in technological progress with an almost religious conviction―yet who sometimes moves too fast for the people around him. With both the promise and peril of AI increasing by the day, Hagey delivers a nuanced, balanced, revelatory account of the individual who is leading us into what he himself has called “the intelligence age.”

Altman is a figure out of Isaac Asimov or Neal Stephenson. Or he is the author himself: if it feels as though we have all collectively stepped into a science fiction short story, it is Altman who is writing it.

Elizabeth Blackwell's autobiographic history of the brave accomplishments of those who made the USA's medical profession accessible to women is illuminating and uplifting. Writing toward the end of the 19th century, Blackwell strikes a dignified and resolute tone throughout this memoir. Prior to Victorian times, women had only a diminished role in the medical profession, which - like most other professional trades at the time - was closed to female participation. Elizabeth Blackwell however was adamant that she could serve as a medic; her persistence led her to become the first woman ever taught in medical school, studying in the USA. Blackwell discusses famous figures in English medicine, such as Florence Nightingale, as well as several more obscure - but nevertheless important and influential - contributors to the progress of women in the medical profession. Towards the end of the book, set in 1858, Elizabeth Blackwell revisits England to behold the hospitals and medical community of that nation.

In spring 1876 a physician named James Madison DeWolf accepted the assignment of contract surgeon for the Seventh Cavalry, becoming one of three surgeons who accompanied Custer's battalion at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Killed in the early stages of the battle, he might easily have become a mere footnote in the many chronicles of this epic campaign - but he left behind an eyewitness account in his diary and correspondence. A Surgeon with Custer at the Little Big Horn is the first annotated edition of these rare accounts since 1958, and the most complete treatment to date. While researchers have known of DeWolf's diary for many years, few details have surfaced about the man himself. In A Surgeon with Custer at the Little Big Horn, Todd E. Harburn bridges this gap, providing a detailed biography of DeWolf as well as extensive editorial insight into his writings. As one of the most highly educated men who traveled with Custer, the surgeon was well equipped to compose articulate descriptions of the 1876 campaign against the Indians, a fateful journey that began for him at Fort Lincoln, Dakota Territory, and ended on the battlefield in eastern Montana Territory. In letters to his beloved wife, Fannie, and in diary entries - reproduced in this volume exactly as he wrote them - DeWolf describes the terrain, weather conditions, and medical needs that he and his companions encountered along the way. After DeWolf's death, his colleague Dr. Henry Porter, who survived the conflict, retrieved his diary and sent it to DeWolf's widow. Later, the DeWolf family donated it to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Now available in this accessible and fully annotated format, the diary, along with the DeWolf's personal correspondence, serves as a unique primary resource for information about the Little Big Horn campaign and medical practices on the western frontier.