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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A small dot on an old piece of birch bark marks one of the biggest events in the history of mathematics. The bark is actually part of an ancient Indian mathematical document known as the Bakhshali ...

Born in Kanpur in 1923, he began his academic career as a physicist and earned his doctorate at the University of Cambridge ...

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 ...

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 ...