Andrew Elliott, The Institute of Actuaries

Andrew Elliott grew up in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa, and studied statistics and actuarial science at the University of Cape Town. He emigrated to the United Kingdom in the late 1980s to work on computer systems, eventually becoming a self-employed management consultant. He has co-founded several companies, Open Square in 2003, and Revolutionary Systems in 2014 to explore systems based on flexible models.

Frustrated by how quantitative information is presented in the media and public discussion, in 2016 Andrew started "Is That A Big Number?, a project to promote numeracy and the development of intuitive number sense.

"... an enjoyable useful book...that helps the reader better interpret and engage with the numbers around them. I enjoyed reading it, and learned from it." -- Francis Hunt, The Mathematical Gazette

Is That a Big Number? is an easy but excellent read for the person who wants to understand large numbers in context of everyday life ... A key tenet of this book is the idea of comparison: every example is stacked against a well-known fact. Every chapter ends with a list of (approximate) relations to help the reader grasp magnitudes of heights, distances, weights, and riches." -- Megan Sawyer, Mathematical Association of America

"The book illustrates well that knowledge (being numerate) is power." -- Adhemar Bultheel, European Mathematical Society

"Wide-ranging and highly accessible, this book is chock-full of fascinating nuggets, providing a rich source of colourful examples of numbers and how they are used. It shows how numeracy and literacy are two sides of the same coin." -- David J. Hand, Senior Research Investigator and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College, London

"This book explores mathematics in a way I have never thought about before. Elliott offers explanations to mathematical ideas in new ways and made them much easier for me to understand." -- Jamie A. Griffin, Yale National Initiative