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 ...

The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. There are infinitely many numbers, and infinitely many ways to combine and manipulate those numbers.

Recent progress on the “sum product” problem recalls a celebrated mathematical result that revealed the power of miniature number systems. It’s one thing to turn a cartwheel in an open field. It’s ...