what if maths simply disappeared?
When thirteen-year-old Maya notices small things going wrong — numbers vanishing, decimals slipping, patterns breaking — she discovers the impossible truth.
Maths isn’t just a school subject to be endured.
It is the language reality is written in.
And something is trying to erase it.
Hidden inside her grandfather’s workshop is a portal to the moments in history where human understanding first began to take shape. When Fella, her loyal fox-red Labrador, charges through it, Maya instinctively follows.
What begins as a chase becomes something far bigger.
Because if the first ideas of maths are erased from history, the future may not survive at all.
At first, the changes are small
A clock loses its digits.
A shopping list rewrites itself.
A receipt no longer adds up.
Distances feel wrong. Patterns break. Reality begins to stutter.
These are not glitches
They are mathslips — signs that the mathematical rules holding the world together are starting to fail.
The adventure begins...
Maya’s first journey takes her to ancient Ur, the greatest city of the world at the time, in Mesopotamia, which is modern Iraq.
Here, maths is not something just written for school. It is essential to this, the first advanced civilisation in history. Grain to be weighed for distribution. Trade to be recorded. Land to be plotted.
In Ur, Maya meets Aya — sharp, brave and practical — whose world is about to change. Records start altering. Counts no longer hold. Numbers disappear. The Null, strange lozenge-shaped drones, appear and start stealing the very maths and mathematicians that enabled this emerging civilisation to flourish.
No one seems able to stop them.
To save reality, Maya, Fella and Aya must uncover what The Null want and rescue Aya’s father.
What makes mathatar different?
A story for anyone who has ever said, “I’m bad at maths.”
Mathatar is a time-travelling, exciting, adventure story first and foremost. It has danger, humour, family, friendship, strange-yet-familiar worlds, ancient secrets and a dog who absolutely should not be trusted near a mysterious portal. Or rabbits. Or Hobnobs, for that matter.
But underneath the adventure is a bigger idea.
Maths is often taught as if it is a test of memory or speed. In Mathatar, maths becomes something different: a way of seeing patterns, asking better questions, solving problems and understanding the world.
This is not a story about being naturally “good” at maths.
It is a story about curiosity, courage and learning to think clearly when everything around you starts to fall apart.
It’s a story of why maths is for all of us and why without it, our world would simply cease to exist as we know it.
Mathatar: The Pillar of Number is book one of a five book series, taking Maya and her friends on a journey that will map how maths made us who we are today.
Meet the Characters
Mathatar might be about travelling through space and time to recover the maths and save the world, history and the universe, but it would be nothing without characters that live, breathe and make the story matter.
