Dunning explores how mathematical notation is a social, world-building technology. It’s natural to think of math as being fundamentally abstract. Whether it’s invented or discovered, its truths are so ...

The symbols we use every day have fascinating and surprisingly recent origins, explains author Joseph Mazur in his new book A few years ago friends and I were talking about the origins of written ...

Juggling is math. Follow me on this one. The connection between the two came out of juggler's attempts to develop a kind of notation for their tricks. That notation, called siteswap, can be used to ...

Now, on to the subject of complex numbers. We have stayed away from this subject until now simply because we did not want to confuse things. Initially, it is easy to think of signals as “real valued.” ...

You can probably think of a time when you’ve used math to solve an everyday problem, such as calculating a tip at a restaurant or determining the square footage of a room. But what role does math play ...