I have two children, one of whom is a son born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that I have two boys? Gary Foshee, a puzzle designer from Issaquah, Wash., posed this puzzle during his talk this ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. David Bessis was drawn to mathematics for the same reason that many people are driven away: He didn’t understand how it worked. Unlike ...

Research in mathematics is a deeply imaginative and intuitive process. This might come as a surprise for those who are still recovering from high-school algebra. What does the world look like at the ...

In ancient Greece, Euclid showed that if you agree on a small list of preliminary principles, or axioms, you can use deductive reasoning to reveal all sorts of new mathematical truths. But although ...

There’s a line from the original Star Trek where Khan says, “Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity, but improve man and you gain a thousandfold.” Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron ...

Mathematicians love the certainty of proofs. This is how they verify that their intuition matches observable truth. This logical love of proofs is uniquely suited to opening up the black box of ...