In the early 1970s mathematician Donald Knuth spent a sabbatical with his wife in Norway. The time was meant to be spent relaxing. Yet one night he woke up his partner in a state of agitation. He ...

What is the most bizarre real number that you can imagine? Probably many people think of an irrational number such as pi (π) or Euler’s number. And indeed, such values can be considered “wild.” After ...

The ancient Greeks wanted to believe that the universe could be described in its entirety using only whole numbers and the ratios between them — fractions, or what we now call rational numbers. But ...

Imagine a horizontal line. The very left is marked one thousand and the very right is marked one billion. On this line, where would you add a marker to represent one million? If you said somewhere in ...

A U.S. computer storage company has calculated the irrational number pi to 105 trillion digits, breaking the previous world record. The calculations took 75 days to complete and used up 1 million ...

The proof, known to be so hard that a mathematician once offered 10 martinis to whoever could figure it out, connects quantum mechanics to infinitely intricate mathematical structures. Hofstadter was ...