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 ...

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 ...

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) ...

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 ...

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, ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in ...

Albert Einstein famously said: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe.” The notion of infinity has been pondered by the greatest minds over the ...

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 ...