The Best Writing on Mathematics 2021

Here, Viktor Blåsjö gives a brief history of "lockdown mathematics"; Yelda Nasifoglu decodes the politics of a seventeenth-century play in which the characters are geometric shapes; and Andrew Lewis-Pye explains the basic algorithmic rules and computational procedures behind cryptocurrencies. In other essays, Terence Tao candidly recalls the adventures and misadventures of growing up to become a leading mathematician; Natalie Wolchover shows how old math gives new clues about whether time really flows; and David Hand discusses the problem of "dark data"—information that is missing or ignored. And there is much, much more.