Have you ever sat in a math classroom and wondered, “When will I ever use this?” You might have asked yourself this question when you first encountered “imaginary” numbers, and with good reason: What could be less practical than a number described as imaginary?
Continue reading “The (Imaginary) Numbers at the Edge of Reality | Quanta Magazine”
What is the largest prime one less than a cubic number?
Consider the largest prime p such that p+1=x3.
We can phrase this as p=x3−1 and factor.
Continue reading “What is the largest prime one less than a cubic number?”
Discovery of the 50th known Mersenne Prime.
Graphs are all around us, we just don’t always see them for what they are.
Abstract Algebra is very different than the algebra most people study in high school. This math subject focuses on abstract structures with names like groups, rings, fields and modules. These structures have applications in many areas of mathematics, and are being used more and more in the sciences, too.
Exclusive: one of the greatest conceptual breakthroughs in mathematics has been traced to the Bakhshali manuscript, dating from the 3rd or 4th century
Trigonometry, the study of the lengths and angles of triangles, sends most modern high schoolers scurrying to their cellphones to look up angles, sines, and cosines. Now, a fresh look at a 3700-year-old clay tablet suggests that Babylonian mathematicians not only developed the first trig table, beating the Greeks to the punch by more than 1000 years, but that they also figured out an entirely new way to look at the subject. However, other experts on the clay tablet, known as Plimpton 322 (P322), say the new work is speculative at best.
A student mistook examples of unsolved math problems for a homework assignment and solved them.
