Writing about music, the saying goes, is like dancing about architecture. The implication is that even trying is futile and likely to make the person doing so look absurd. The line has been attributed ...

Teaching writing and mathematics in the same course leaves Ruth Starkman considering the way humanities and mathematics students approach problems. Everything would have been perfectly ordinary that ...

It’s natural to think that mathematics is primarily about numbers. In school, we first learn how to recite numbers and then spend considerable time writing them down and manipulating them on paper. Of ...

Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite within reach. In 2012, the mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki claimed he had solved the abc conjecture ...

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

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 ...