As the Ishango bone, the Plimpton 322 tablet and other artifacts throughout history display, prime numbers have fascinated and captivated people throughout history. Today, prime numbers and their ...

Prime numbers have captivated mathematicians for thousands of years—and now cloud computing is helping them chase the biggest ones yet.

The secret history of numbers: How math shapes our lives in amazing, unpredictable ways The relationship between people and numbers is so much more fascinating than simple dollars and cents ...

The natives of a remote Polynesian Island invented a binary number system, similar to the one used by computers to calculate, centuries before Western mathematicians did, new research suggests.

Almost 30 years ago, a group of Kaktovik students invented a numbering system that reflected the way they counted in Iñupiaq and made math more intuitive for them. Soon, anyone in the world will ...

India, by adding zero to the positional number system, unleashed the true power of numbers, advancing mathematics from infancy to adolescence, and from rudimentary toward its current sophistication.

Why a common number system is elusive A new effort is underway to create a broad new system to number community college courses that would be accessible and easily understandable to all students.

It should come as no surprise that the first recorded use of the number zero, recently discovered to be made as early as the 3rd or 4th century, happened in India. Mathematics on the Indian ...

The math works perfectly in each case. In the usual decimal system, the number 17 (that is, a 1 followed by a 7) indicates that you have to calculate 10 + 7 × 1 (17 = 1 × 10 + 7 × 1).