The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Mathematics started with numbers—clear, concrete, intuitive. Over the last two centuries, however, it has become a far more abstract ...

If you haven’t thought much about numbers much since that college calculus class, you might not think about how they’re relevant to everyday life, aside from maintaining your bank account and doing ...

Math is one of those disciplines that has a long and colorful history. If you want to learn more about the great math minds of the past, you should download Minds of Modern Mathematics from IBM. The ...

Although Dr. Grigori Perelman's refusal of the prestigious Millennium Prize for mathematics--and its million-dollar purse--was met with shock in the media this past March, it was not without precedent ...

The information presented here is intended to describe the course goals for current and prospective students as well as others who are interested in our courses. It is not intended to replace the ...

I’m a zero at mental arithmetic. It’s true—I struggle with this skill—but I want to focus on the phrase itself. In our language, we often equate zero with something negative. But zero is the only real ...

Centuries ago, a prestigious Islamic library brought Arabic numerals to the world. Though the library long since disappeared, its mathematical revolution changed our world. The House of Wisdom sounds ...

Before the 13th century Europeans used Roman numerals to do arithmetic. Leonardo of Pisa, better known today as Fibonacci, is largely responsible for the adoption of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system in ...