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 ...

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 ...

Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers ...