THE MATHEMATICS OF EXTINCT ALPHABETS: Topology Theorems Hidden Inside Every Dead Language

What if the shape of a letter could outlive the language it once recorded? In this genuinely rigorous yet endlessly readable work of popular mathematics, topologist Prof. Maevis Lorundal-Cheung reveals a hidden mathematical architecture running beneath every writing system humanity has ever invented, and shows how real, standard mathematics, graph theory, topology, information theory, and group theory, has quietly powered some of history's greatest decipherment triumphs. From the wedge shaped signs of cuneiform pressed into Mesopotamian clay, to the Rosetta Stone's cracking of Egyptian hieroglyphs, to the astonishing amateur breakthrough that let an architect named Michael Ventris read a Bronze Age script no scholar had managed to unlock in fifty years, this book traces the mathematics hiding inside the world's oldest writing. It ventures into the scripts that remain undeciphered to this day, Linear A, the Rongorongo tablets of Easter Island, and the still fiercely disputed Indus Valley script, showing exactly what mathematics can prove, and exactly where its power runs out. Blending real archaeology with real mathematics and vivid, propulsive storytelling, The Mathematics of Extinct Alphabets transforms the alphabet on this very page into something you will never look at the same way again.