As I told my class on Thursday, the theme of the first week of our math history course was “easy algebra is hard in base 60.” We started the semester in ancient Mesopotamia, trying to understand ...

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 ...

Many complicated advances in research mathematics are spurred by a desire to understand some of the simplest questions about numbers. How are prime numbers distributed in the integers? Are there ...

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 ...