A shard of smooth bone etched with irregular marks dating back 20,000 years puzzled archaeologists until they noticed something unique – the etchings, lines like tally marks, may have represented ...

For thousands of years, philosophers have pondered cardinality: knowing “how many.” Using a series of crude estimates, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes worked out the approximate number of ...

We humans are a smart bunch, but we really suck when it comes to understanding and handling excessively large numbers. Here’s why we’re so bad at it — and what you can do to make sense of concepts and ...

This video breaks down how scientists and economists use very large numbers, with clear examples from astronomy, mathematics, and modern wealth statistics to make scale easier to understand. Florida’s ...

Prime numbers are only divisible by themselves and one. Robert Brook via Getty Images In the 17th century, French monk and mathematician Marin Mersenne developed a method to find prime numbers: values ...

In an ingenious Reddit post this week, user Gedanke shared an image of a “Gaussian Prime that looks like Gauss.” That’s it up there, in all its glory. So who’s the guy in the picture? Carl Friedrich ...

So far this year, Quanta has chronicled three major advances in Ramsey theory, the study of how to avoid creating mathematical patterns. The first result put a new cap on how big a set of integers can ...