Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner once wrote that mathematics has the uncanny ability to describe the universe around us. That’s the spirit behind the new book “The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the ...

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “the music of the spheres,” your first thought probably wasn’t about mathematics. But in its historical origin, the music of the spheres actually was all about math. In ...

Around 1900 B.C., a student in the Sumerian city of Nippur, in what’s now Iraq, copied a multiplication table onto a clay tablet. Some 4,000 years later, that schoolwork survives, as do the student’s ...