Galileo once famously described the universe as a great book “written in mathematical language and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures.” Unfortunately, it’s a language ...

Question: I’ve always wondered why is it mathematics is considered the “universal language” in physics and the explanation of the natural world. What is the possibility of different civilizations ...

Almost 400 years ago, in The Assayer, Galileo wrote: “Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe … [But the book] is written in the language of mathematics.” He was much more than an ...

It’s a complaint many algebra teachers are familiar with, as more letters and symbols are introduced with progressively harder courses in mathematics. But why did the plus symbol emerge as the ...

There is no shortage of popular books and lectures on math—but they can only teach us so much. Mathematics has long been presented as a sanctuary from confusion and doubt, a place to go in search of ...

“The Secret Lives of Numbers,” by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell, highlights overlooked contributions to the field by ancient thinkers, non-Westerners and women. By Alec Wilkinson Alec Wilkinson is ...

Excerpted with permission from Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, by Max Tegmark. Available from Random House/Knopf. Copyright ...

The recipient of the 2024 Crafoord Prize in Mathematics discusses math as art, math as language, and math as abstract thought. It took a long time for Claire Voisin to fall in love with mathematics.

Nearly twenty years after I graduated high school and my last calculus class, I still get that nightmare where I’m at the exam for a calculus course I somehow forgot to attend, or that I faked my way ...

In “The Great Math War,” Jason Socrates Bardi takes on a battle for the soul of numbers that divided the experts of its day. By Jordan Ellenberg Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at the ...

The following is adapted from the introduction to “The Riddler: Fantastic Puzzles from FiveThirtyEight,” published by W. W. Norton & Co. It is in stores today! The world’s oldest collection of math ...