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, ...

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) ...

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 ...

A basic feature of number theory, prime numbers are also a fundamental building block of computer science, from hashtables to cryptography. Everyone knows that a prime number is one that cannot be ...

In “The Great Math War,” Jason Socrates Bardi takes on a battle for the soul of numbers that divided the experts of its day. By Jordan Ellenberg Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at the ...