100 Best Very Short Introductions in Math and Science

Oxford University Press has been publishing the Very Short Introductions since 1995. There are more than eight hundred of them now, they are all the same size, they all run to roughly 150 pages, and they are all written by someone who actually works on the subject. The series has a Fields medalist explaining what mathematics is, the man who built Babbage's engine explaining computers, and the physicist who has explained CERN to the public for forty years explaining the vacuum. No other series on earth has that bench.

That is also the problem with it. Eight hundred small identical books are a wall, not a shelf. Most lists of the “best” Very Short Introductions are really lists of the ones that sold, and a bestseller list is the opposite of a reading order. What I wanted was something narrower and stranger: one hundred of them, chosen from the mathematics and natural science titles alone, that fit together. Not the hundred best books, but the hundred that add up to one education.

So here is the rule I set myself. Ten shelves. Ten books on each. The shelves run in an order, from the counting numbers to the question of what science even is, and the books on each shelf run in an order too. Every book on the list is paired with one other book on the list, the one it should be read beside, so the whole thing is a web and not a pile. Each shelf opens with the book that defines its subject. And if a hundred is too many, there is a ten-book spine down the middle, one book per shelf, that is the shortest honest path through the lot.

A few things were ruled out on purpose. No medicine and no psychology, except where the subject is the physical brain itself. No biographies except the four or five whose subjects changed what science is. No titles outside the series, however good, so Hardy and the rest of the short-book canon live elsewhere on this site. Where a title has a newer edition, I mean the newest one. And I have tried to be honest about age: the oldest book here is from 2000 and the newest from 2025, and when one of them has been overtaken by events I say so.

The whole stack is about fifteen thousand pages. At a book a week, two years. At a shelf a season, two and a half. It is the only complete science education I know of that fits in one drawer.