The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. David Bessis was drawn to mathematics for the same reason that many people are driven away: He didn’t understand how it worked. Unlike ...

University of Florida provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US. Math can’t catch a break. These days, people on both ends of the political spectrum are lining up to deride the ...

There’s a line from the original Star Trek where Khan says, “Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity, but improve man and you gain a thousandfold.” Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron ...

Mathematicians love the certainty of proofs. This is how they verify that their intuition matches observable truth. This logical love of proofs is uniquely suited to opening up the black box of ...

In ancient Greece, Euclid showed that if you agree on a small list of preliminary principles, or axioms, you can use deductive reasoning to reveal all sorts of new mathematical truths. But although ...