Why do we insist that our god be infinite? Why would being bound in a nutshell world give us bad dreams? Why do we fear the cloister more than the agora? Longing and love have always “the expansion of ...

For all of the recent strides we’ve made in the math world—like a supercomputer finally solving the Sum of Three Cubes problem that puzzled mathematicians for 65 years—we’re forever crunching ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

The infinite hotel paradox imagines a hotel with endless rooms that somehow runs out of space. Even when new guests arrive, the manager can always make room—until the logic collapses under its own ...

In an infinite lottery can you create a lottery ticket that always wins? This is the idea behind a 50-year-old maths problem that has now been solved. In a standard lottery, you have a ticket with a ...

Math is always reinventing itself. In the late 19th century, its foundations were still shaky, its definitions and assumptions vague and uncertain. Mathematicians spent decades fixing the problem, ...