More than 150 years ago, the economist and philosopher William Stanley Jevons discovered something curious about the number four. While musing about how the mind conceives of numbers, he tossed a ...

What better time to contemplate the conundrum that is zero than the start of a new year? Zero is a fairly new concept in human history and even more recent as a number. It wasn't until around the 7th ...

On Wednesday, 4 January 2023, the U.K.’s Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, made his first major speech of the year, proposing to reform education by putting a focus on maths being taught for all pupils up ...

Imagine a horizontal line. The very left is marked one thousand and the very right is marked one billion. On this line, where would you add a marker to represent one million? If you said somewhere in ...

Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers ...

For most of humans' existence, our ancestors led precarious lives as scavengers, hunters, and gatherers, and there were fewer than 10 million people on Earth at any one time. Today, many cities have ...

Ian Lange's recent letter (Aug. 30) on global population is absolutely right on! Nearly a half century ago, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote a book, "Zero Population Growth," that expressed the ...