Most people learn to count and do basic arithmetic at a young age and don’t give these skills a second thought. But numerosity or numeracy, the ability to think about and use numbers, is more than a ...

To a nonmathematician, having the letter “i” represent a number that does not quite exist and is “imaginary” can be hard to wrap your head around. If you open your mind to this way of thinking, ...

William Ross does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in general, research mathematicians don’t need to think about it ...

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 ...

Is there an infinity of infinities? The question sounds almost absurd, like a child’s riddle meant to twist your brain into knots. But for mathematicians, it’s a serious (and endlessly fascinating) ...

One question has preoccupied humankind for thousands of years: Do infinities exist? More than 2,300 years ago Aristotle distinguished between two types of infinity: potential and actual. The former ...