In the early 1970s mathematician Donald Knuth spent a sabbatical with his wife in Norway. The time was meant to be spent relaxing. Yet one night he woke up his partner in a state of agitation. He ...

Number and space are inherently related. Previous research has provided evidence that numbers are aligned to a so-called “mental number line”, which is malleable and affected by cultural factors ...

Numeracy or numerosity, the ability to think about and use numbers, varies among human cultures and within populations, much like intelligence does. Many known languages, for example, have no words ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sometimes mathematicians try to tackle a problem head on, and sometimes they come at it sideways. That’s especially true when the ...

The ancient Greeks wanted to believe that the universe could be described in its entirety using only whole numbers and the ratios between them — fractions, or what we now call rational numbers. But ...