The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in ...

Most people learn to count and do basic arithmetic at a young age and don’t give these skills a second thought. But numerosity or numeracy, the ability to think about and use numbers, is more than a ...

Mathematicians sometimes think of their research as a garden and unsolved problems as seeds waiting to sprout. Some problems are analogous to tulip bulbs. As mathematicians work to solve them, they ...

In “The Great Math War,” Jason Socrates Bardi takes on a battle for the soul of numbers that divided the experts of its day. By Jordan Ellenberg Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at the ...

A basic feature of number theory, prime numbers are also a fundamental building block of computer science, from hashtables to cryptography. Everyone knows that a prime number is one that cannot be ...