Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Irrational numbers such as pi or the square root of 2 have always fascinated humankind. After all, they symbolize infinity better ...

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 ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

The ancient scholar Hippasus of Metapontum was punished with death for his discovery of irrational numbers—or at least that’s the legend. What actually happened in the fifth century B.C.E. is far from ...

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 ...

The exact story is contested, but in every version, it has a grim ending. A man discovers a new mathematical truth and loses his life for it. In every version of the narrative, the ancient Greek ...

Irrational numbers such as pi or the square root of 2 have always fascinated humankind. After all, they symbolize infinity better than anything else: their sequence of digits after the decimal point ...