Long before robots could run or cars could drive themselves, mathematicians contemplated a simple mathematical question. They figured it out, then laid it to rest—with no way of knowing that the ...

The Greek philosopher Plato wrote about Socrates challenging a student with the "doubling the square" problem in about 385 B.C.E. When asked to double the area of a square, the student doubled the ...

Two New Orleans high school students recently attended a conference where they proved an “impossible” math problem by using trigonometry. For more than 2,000 years, mathematicians worldwide have ...

Children’s blocks lie scattered on the floor. You start playing with them — squares, rectangles, triangles and hexagons — moving them around, flipping them over, seeing how they fit together. You feel ...

Here’s a simple-sounding problem: Imagine a circular fence that encloses one acre of grass. If you tie a goat to the inside of the fence, how long a rope do you need to allow the animal access to ...

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 ...

Prime Number Patterns Prime numbers, divisible only by themselves and 1, have long fascinated mathematicians. Discovering new ...

"Even the +, −, =, and x signs we take for granted only came into widespread use in the 17th century. Which means that the earlier algebraists we know of … all had expressed their equations mostly in ...

The last dimension of Keller's conjecture has been proven using a computer algorithm. The conjecture involves the way hypercubes in different dimensions share sides when tiled. The proof is ...

Given that humans have been studying numbers for thousands of years, you might think we know everything about the number 3. But mathematicians recently discovered something new about 3: a third way to ...