Here's what happens when someone with no experience hits an iconic racetrack in a 795-hp beast
I thought that would be the usual first step — something light without too much power, like a Mazda MX-5 on a basic track — but it turns out I had an opportunity to dive right in by getting behind the wheel of a 4,100-pound, 795-horsepower beast that is the Ford Mustang Dark Horse SC.
Key points
- What that means, and how we might adapt, is the focus of a new book, Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World, by applied mathematicians Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend.
- He has also studied chaos theory as applied to physics, the geometry of supercoiled DNA, and the biological collective oscillators, such as swarms of synchronously flashing fireflies and crickets that chirp in unison.
- An award-winning communicator, Strogatz wrote three series of columns on mathematics for The New York Times in 2010, 2012, and 2025 and hosted a podcast for Quanta magazine from 2020–2021.
While my daily driver is a Ford Bronco Sport with a whopping 181 horsepower, the Dark Horse SC was way more approachable than I thought it would be for someone like myself who has never experienced that kind of power.
Additional details
- The rise of computers helped fuel its dominance, enabling us to work with increasingly large numbers that would otherwise be beyond the capacity of our finite human brains.
- He has written four popular books: Sync (2003), The Calculus of Friendship (2009), The Joy of X (2012), and the New York Times bestseller Infinite Powers (2019).
- Strogatz is perhaps best known in his field for his co-authorship of a seminal 1998 paper with Duncan Watts on the collective dynamics of small-world networks.
- But with the rise of large language models, AI chatbots, and, soon, quantum computing, so-called "big math" is beginning to outstrip its creators entirely.
- Our modern world runs on math, from social media algorithms, package delivery, and weather prediction to medical imaging and machine learning.
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