Humans, for the most part, count in chunks of 10 — that’s the foundation of the decimal system. Despite its near-universal adoption, however, it’s a completely arbitrary numbering system that emerged ...

For centuries, the ancient Romans calculated sums with their clunky numerals: I, V, X, L, C, D, and M; or one, five, ten, 50, 100, 500, and 1,000. They knew nothing better. Then, Western Europe’s ...

The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

Recent progress on the “sum product” problem recalls a celebrated mathematical result that revealed the power of miniature number systems. It’s one thing to turn a cartwheel in an open field. It’s ...

The International System of Units (with the abbreviation of SI units) is one of the foundations of modern science. It consists of seven base units from which all others can be derived. These are the ...