At Pasadena City College, college algebra for STEM majors is labeled Math 003. At Cypress College, it’s Math 141-C and at Napa Valley, it’s Math 106. For anyone hoping to enroll in the same course at ...

The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

For centuries, mathematicians tried to solve problems by adding new values to the usual numbers. Now they’re investigating the unintended consequences of that tinkering. In 1847, Gabriel Lamé proved ...

The twin primes conjecture is one of the most important and difficult questions in mathematics. Two mathematicians have solved a parallel version of the problem for small number systems. On September ...

As I told my class on Thursday, the theme of the first week of our math history course was “easy algebra is hard in base 60.” We started the semester in ancient Mesopotamia, trying to understand ...

In positional systems, as mentioned earlier, the number represented is multiplied by the base each time you move to the left of a position and is always divided by the base each time you move to the ...