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 ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

For thousands of years, philosophers have pondered cardinality: knowing “how many.” Using a series of crude estimates, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes worked out the approximate number of ...

In 1971, German mathematicians Schönhage and Strassen predicted a faster algorithm for multiplying large numbers, but it ...

More than 150 years ago, the economist and philosopher William Stanley Jevons discovered something curious about the number 4. While musing about how the mind conceives of numbers, he tossed a handful ...