How useful is the information you get from the measure of any thing? That depends on what you chose measure in the first place, and that’s not always clear.
Let’s say you want the perfect mix of friends and strangers at your next party. Mathematicians have been working on a version of this problem for nearly a century, and the answer is complicated.
There is plenty of evidence to show Australia’s Indigenous people had ways of counting big numbers, yet the myth persists they couldn’t count more than a handful of things. Why?
On international Pi Day it’s time to look at Pi’s position in unique formula that’s praised much for its beauty in uniting several mathematical constants.
Scientific advances – including the recent discovery of gravitational waves – force us to deal with numbers so extreme they’re virtually inconceivable.