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, ...

When you hear the words "rational" and "irrational," they might bring to mind the relentlessly analytical Spock in "Star Trek." If you're a mathematician, however, you probably think of ratios between ...

All non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have real part one-half. Unfortunately, all those negative even numbers are trivial zeros. So … where are these non-trivial ones? To answer that, I must take ...

The ancient scholar Hippasus of Metapontum was punished with death for his discovery of irrational numbers—or at least that’s the legend. What actually happened in the fifth century B.C.E. is far from ...

The world of math is complex … in more ways than one. Sure, it’s full of complex ideas that are all tied up and packaged within beautiful and often times complex wrapping paper that is adorned with ...

When my students grow too dependent on their calculators, I ask them to find a number that, when multiplied by itself, gives them 2. Students quickly see that since 1² = 1 and 2² = 4, the answer has ...

The Arithmetic of Whole, Rational, Irrational and Complex Numbers; a Supplement to Text-Books on the Differential and Integral Calculus. By Edmund Landau. Translated by F. Steinhardt. Pp. xiv + 134.