This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Whenever an impressive new technology comes ...

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 ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the ...

It’s a complaint many algebra teachers are familiar with, as more letters and symbols are introduced with progressively harder courses in mathematics. But why did the plus symbol emerge as the ...