Before the 13th century Europeans used Roman numerals to do arithmetic. Leonardo of Pisa, better known today as Fibonacci, is largely responsible for the adoption of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system in ...

Ever wondered how the highway and interstate numbers came to be? What do they even mean if they mean anything at all? Behind those numbered shields displayed on the signs is a mathematical logic grid ...

As I told my class on Thursday, the theme of the first week of our math history course was “easy algebra is hard in base 60.” We started the semester in ancient Mesopotamia, trying to understand ...

A small dot on an old piece of birch bark marks one of the biggest events in the history of mathematics. The bark is actually part of an ancient Indian mathematical document known as the Bakhshali ...

The twin primes conjecture is one of the most important and difficult questions in mathematics. Two mathematicians have solved a parallel version of the problem for small number systems. On September ...

For centuries, mathematicians tried to solve problems by adding new values to the usual numbers. Now they’re investigating the unintended consequences of that tinkering. In 1847, Gabriel Lamé proved ...

Thus, more digits are needed in the binary system than in the decimal system and, in turn, more digits are needed in the decimal system than in the hexadecimal system, again to represent the same ...