Three, as Schoolhouse Rock! told children of the 1970s, is a magic number. Three little pigs; three beds, bowls and bears for Goldilocks; three Star Wars trilogies. You need at least three legs for a ...

As I told my class on Thursday, the theme of the first week of our math history course was “easy algebra is hard in base 60.” We started the semester in ancient Mesopotamia, trying to understand ...

The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

The University of California today (August 8) announced that it has admitted a record number of California freshmen to its incoming class of undergraduate students and its largest class of ...

Binary and hexadecimal numbers systems underpin the way modern computer systems work. Low-level interactions with hexadecimal (hex) and binary are uncommon in the world of Java programming, but ...