Mathematics is often thought of as a subject that a student either understands or doesn't, with little in between. In reality, mathematics encompasses a wide variety of skills and concepts. Although ...

Richard Elwes reports on Harvey Friedman’s fascinating work on incompleteness in Boolean relation theory, but it is quite a stretch to extend his work to ask “are the rules of arithmetic… unsound?” ...

What is pure mathematics? What do pure mathematicians do? Why is pure mathematics important? These are questions I’m often confronted with when people discover I do pure mathematics. I always manage ...

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 ...