3/14 on the calendar approximates the first three digits of the mathematical constant π. Math nerds will celebrate with baked goods, but π is a deeper, nobler entity.
A special Pi Day this year for those who celebrate this remarkable number on March 14, a date that can be written 3/14. Given 3.14 is Pi to two decimal places, what happens when you add in the year?
Recent research suggests a new way to look at the famous prisoner’s dilemma and how the results could help us better understand human behavior and encourage cooperation.
The past three decades have seen an unprecedented explosion of activity in a new sub-discipline of mathematics: financial mathematics. The emergence of this field has parallelled the expansion of the quantitative…
Origami is the ancient Japanese art of paper folding. One uncut square of paper can, in the hands of an origami artist, be folded into a bird, a frog, a sailboat, or a Japanese samurai helmet beetle. Origami…
Imagine you are captain of the national cricket team. With 20 minutes left in day one of a test match, your top-order batsman is dismissed. Do you employ a nightwatchman? That is, do you send in a tail-end…
Teaching maths concepts has long been considered the domain of the classroom teacher, with many parents often feeling unable to help their kids develop this skill. However, parents already do many things…
Alan Turing is one of the world’s best-known mathematicians, and probably the best known in the past century. This is partly for his work on cracking German codes in World War II, and partly for his arrest…
Consider a standard pizza box containing a standard circular pizza. How much more would you be willing to pay for a square pizza that filled the box? Clearly the square pizza contains more pizza: but is…
When numbers of any sort are presented in mathematics, science, business, government or finance, it’s fair to say a reader assumes that the data are reasonably reliable to their last digit. But presenting…
Hipsters are so mainstream now that they’re the subject of mathematical papers. Jonathan Touboul, a mathematical neuroscientist from the Collège de France, claims to have answered one of the great mysteries…
The US Social Security system has been heading toward insolvency for decades, with the program now projected to run a 25% deficit by a little after 2030, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Despite…
There has been much publicity in recent years about China and its teachers. After the most recent results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) were published in 2013, considerable…