Originally defined as the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, pi — written as the Greek letter π — appears throughout mathematics, including in areas that are completely ...

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 ...

Mathematicians attended Roger Apéry’s lecture at a French National Center for Scientific Research conference in June 1978 with a great deal of skepticism. The presentation was entitled “On the ...