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 ...

Prime numbers, once the timeless domain of pure human curiosity, are now at the center of a technological shift. From ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...