A shard of smooth bone etched with irregular marks dating back 20,000 years puzzled archaeologists until they noticed something unique – the etchings, lines like tally marks, may have represented ...
Prime numbers are more than just numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one. They are a mathematical mystery, the secrets of which mathematicians have been trying to uncover ever since ...
Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The number zero was a relatively recent and crucial addition − it allows numbers to extend in both directions forever.
In 1992, Karen Wynn’s numbers came in big. The numbers in question were tiny in an absolute sense, but they counted for a lot among investigators of child development. The reason: Wynn claimed to have ...
When faced with choosing the shortest queue at a supermarket, what do you do? Nobody starts counting – what our brain does is “number sensing”. The ability to gauge numbers occurs without knowing how ...
Hilbert’s 12th problem asked for novel analogues of the roots of unity, the building blocks for certain number systems. Now, over 100 years later, two mathematicians have produced them. Problems in ...