While American children once learned to add by reading a poster of animals and birds, they do it now by playing games on computers. Each step in between—whether it be a box of blocks or exercises ...

In 1886 the mathematician Leopold Kronecker famously said, “God Himself made the whole numbers — everything else is the work of men.” Indeed, mathematicians have introduced new sets of numbers besides ...

From AT&T to NASA, women working as computers performed the calculations that made modern science possible. In the early 1900s, computing joined teaching and nursing as one of the few careers open to ...

For mathematicians and computer scientists, 2020 was full of discipline-spanning discoveries and celebrations of creativity. Several long-standing problems yielded to sustained collaboration, ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in ...