The following is an excerpt from Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics, by Eugenia Cheng Mathematics can be thought of as many things: a language, a tool, a game. It might ...

The famous mathematical ratio, estimated to more than 22 trillion digits (and counting), is the perfect symbol for our species’ long effort to tame infinity. By Steven Strogatz This article, ...

This is what happens when you mess with infinity. You might think that if you simply started adding the natural numbers, 1 plus 2 plus 3 and so on all the way to infinity, you would get a pretty big ...

Mathematics is often about uncovering patterns. For example, certain areas of topology revolve around categorizing knots or geometric shapes, and number theory explores properties such as the ...

What can baby carrots tell us about infinity? Photo by ilovebutter/flickr/CC BY 2.0 Infinity is big. Really big. As mathematician Eugenia Cheng puts it, it’s the “biggest thing there is.” In her new ...

With infinity, we made a monster. Our minds demand that it should exist – only to rapidly melt at the consequences of a concept that is, by definition, too big for our brains. The pleasure and the ...

Have you even thought deeply about Buzz Lightyear's famous catchphrase from the "Toy Story" movies? Probably not. But maybe you've sometimes looked up at the night sky and wondered about the nature of ...

Number theorist Yitang Zhang receives the Qiu Shi Outstanding Scientist Award for his exploration into the nature of prime numbers Yitang Zhang may not be a household name, but in the world of ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... The life of the imagination is difficult to capture, let alone to contain, onscreen. For that reason, movies about such original thinkers as famous writers ...

IF YOU were forced to learn long division at school, you might have had cause to curse whoever invented arithmetic. A wearisome whirl of divisors and dividends, of bringing the next digit down and ...