The ancient Greeks wanted to believe that the universe could be described in its entirety using only whole numbers and the ratios between them — fractions, or what we now call rational numbers. But ...

At first glance, the problem seems ridiculously simple. And yet experts have been searching for a solution in vain for decades. According to mathematician Jeffrey Lagarias, number theorist Shizuo ...

In “The Great Math War,” Jason Socrates Bardi takes on a battle for the soul of numbers that divided the experts of its day. By Jordan Ellenberg Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at the ...