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 ...

A trillion. A googol. A centillion. TREE(3). Somewhere between zero and infinity is a host of finite, but mind-bogglingly huge numbers. But while mathematicians have dreamed up large numbers for ages ...

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 ...

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 ...