A Room in Bombay
PRE-ORDER A Room in Bombay
Manil Suri is the author of the forthcoming memoir, A Room in Bombay, three internationally acclaimed novels, The Death of Vishnu, The Age of Shiva and The City of Devi, and a book on popular mathematics, The Big Bang of Numbers.
He has served as a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and is a distinguished university professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is a passionate promoter of both mathematics and the humanities, and has motivated audiences worldwide to embrace both, rather than just one or the other.
Arriving April 21, 2026
A Memoir
Politics and Prose
View DetailsEssays on life, writing, math, India, and connecting it all.
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My secret? I’ve expressed this number in binary mode. In this mode, the number 2 is written as 10, 4 (=22) as 100, 8 (=23) as 1000, etc. So 10,000,000 (i.e. 1 with 7 zeros) in binary is the same as 27 = 128. Substack subscribership supposedly grows exponentially, i.e. it doubles every fixed period (in binary, this means it adds a zero after every fixed period). So when I reach 2 × 128 = 256 subscribers we’ll change the count to 100,000,000.
