MATH

"My father, you see, interested me in patterns at the very beginning, and then later in things, like we would turn over stones and watch the ants carry the little white babies down deeper into the holes. We would look at worms. We’d go for walks and we’d

The odds are 1 in 1,296. We can do this!

Almost 40 years after the 1975 Metric Conversion Act, the head of the U.S. Metric Program explains why change is hard.

We have a lot of words that mean a bunch of stuff or a bit of something, but many of those terms have actual, specific meanings. Let's learn about a whole barrel full of them.

Eighteenth-century mathematician William Jones had a problem with pi—namely, it didn’t exist yet. At the time of his working and teaching in the field of mathematics, there was no term for the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, despite the

Today is a big day for lovers of the number 12, and no one loves 12s more than the members of the Dozenal Society. The Dozenal Society advocates for ditching the base-10 system we use for counting in favor of a base-12 system. Because 12 is cleanly divisi

Kryptos, a set of huge copper plates with enciphered text carved into them, is an encrypted sculpture installed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Although the sculpture was installed in 1990, it took until 1999 for someone to actually decrypt part

Forgetting to convert units of measurement can result in big-time disasters—like these six examples.