A recent entry in the visitor’s book of the James Joyce Tower & Museum in Sandycove, Dublin, perplexed the Friends of Joyce’s Tower, the volunteers who run the museum. The entry, reproduced as the ...

Major reforms and inventions often begin with a line of mathematics. For students, equations can look abstract on a classroom board. Yet some of them reorganised science, engineering and economics.

Marcus du Sautoy argues that mathematics is the driving force behind modern science: Leonhard Euler and an 18th-century puzzle. This ten-part history of mathematics reveals the personalities behind ...

Have you ever been curious about why the number e is so popular in math? Euler’s number, which is an infinitely long decimal, close to 2.71828, pops up naturally in a surprisingly broad range of ...

Mathematicians are an odd bunch. Isaac Newton was decidedly unpleasant, secretive and resentful while Carl Friedrich Gauss, according to several biographies, was cold and austere, more likely to ...