The following is an excerpt from Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics, by Eugenia Cheng Mathematics can be thought of as many things: a language, a tool, a game. It might ...

When Ed Scheinerman's 7-year-old granddaughter asked the question that every mathematician secretly loves—"What is the number before infinity?"—he knew he was onto something. "You're not going to like ...

This is what happens when you mess with infinity. You might think that if you simply started adding the natural numbers, 1 plus 2 plus 3 and so on all the way to infinity, you would get a pretty big ...

With infinity, we made a monster. Our minds demand that it should exist – only to rapidly melt at the consequences of a concept that is, by definition, too big for our brains. The pleasure and the ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... The life of the imagination is difficult to capture, let alone to contain, onscreen. For that reason, movies about such original thinkers as famous writers ...

What can baby carrots tell us about infinity? Photo by ilovebutter/flickr/CC BY 2.0 Infinity is big. Really big. As mathematician Eugenia Cheng puts it, it’s the “biggest thing there is.” In her new ...

A statement can be true or false. But as Kurt Gödel demonstrated, there will always be mathematical assumptions that can ...

After all, I know a lot about math. What many people don’t realize is that the academic subject of mathematics is not about ...

Last week, my first grader came home with thoughts about math (I love it when she does that!) She said that, since one hundred plus ten was “one hundred and ten”, that, therefore, infinity plus ten ...