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 ...

March 14 — a day you’re more likely than most others to eat — or throw — a pie and get a reduced price on your pizza. It’s all in celebration of pi (Greek letter π), the mathematical constant and ...

“HIGHER Mathematics,” edited by Mansfield Merriman and Robert S. Woodward, is a text-book for classical and engineering colleges, and is a work containing 600 pages. Each chapter is written by a ...

The Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–83) was all but blind when he moved to St Petersburg in 1766 for a second stint as the star of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences. He had lost vision ...

Participants of the First International Congress, held at the Islamic Civilization Centre in Uzbekistan, reflected on the ...

The narrow paths between the book-crammed shelves at the Department of the History of Mathematics in Wilbour Hall might induce claustrophobia. And the stacks of yellowing, oversized photocopies are ...

Adapted fromInfinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World, by Amir Alexander, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and ...

In his book The Mathematical Universe, mathematician William Dunham wrote of John Venn’s namesake legacy, the Venn diagram, “No one in the long history of mathematics ever became better known for less ...

Eric Mack has been a CNET contributor since 2011. Eric and his family live 100% energy and water independent on his off-grid compound in the New Mexico desert. Eric uses his passion for writing about ...