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 ...

Allen Razdow, who wrote Mathcad in 1985, has just released his latest tool for engineers and other numerically-inclined professionals: True Numbers, an online service and specification that lets users ...

The p-adics form an infinite collection of number systems based on prime numbers. They’re at the heart of modern number theory. The rational numbers are the most familiar numbers: 1, -5, ½, and every ...

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 ...