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 ...

When imagining medieval Europe, most people envision knights and castles and maybe cathedrals. Science is usually nowhere in the picture. Apart from monks copying manuscripts, intellectual activity in ...

Math as both profession and course of study can be a hard sell, something even Don Draper might have trouble pitching. The field unites numbers, theories, and ideas that, yes, can be physically ...

An error in a proof underlying a widely used branch of modern mathematics was accidentally discovered by mathematicians while translating old proofs to a computer ...

Thanks to the information revolution, a stunning 90% of the data created by humanity has been generated in just the past two years. Yet the math taught in U.S. schools hasn’t materially changed since ...

Conversations about understanding maths in modern life continue long after Pi Day – whether you celebrated it or not. Each year on 14 March, classrooms, cafés, and science centres buzz with number ...