Before the arrival of the microchip in the 1970s, a maths boffin didn’t have the luxury of a portable electronic calculator. They carried an abacus, a blackboard, and a bit of chalk on their person at all times. But wait, we stand corrected – for a brief spell in the second half of the twentieth century, there was an alternative, an ingenious device known as the Curta Read More >>

Though most people in this world never want to think about maths after school, let's talk about its symbols. Where and when did the symbols for addition and subtraction get invented? We don't even question them when we see them now. But what the heck did people use before that? Read More >>

There's only so much you can say in 140 paltry characters. So how many possible different tweets are there that could ever be sent? Read More >>

When Phillip Bump heard about the recently discovered 17-million-digit prime number—the world's biggest!—he decided to celebrate. So he took it and, six digits at a time, converted it into RGB. The result is strangely compelling. [Phillip Bump via Boing Boing] Read More >>

The world's largest prime number just got much, much bigger. Say hello to 2^57,885,161-1, a prime number that is over 17 million characters long when written out in full -- enough to fill 13,000 pages of A4 paper. Read More >>

NPR's Robert Krulwich has a whimsical piece on the one formula that rules it all, from unicellular organisms to whales and sequoias and humans. A maths formula that governs our life and tells us when to die. Read More >>

There are all kinds of people who'd want to know if a movie will be a hit before it comes out: companies who are throwing down money on advertising, and even you before you let yourself get excited. Well according to researchers at Tottori University, there's a mathematical equation out there that can do a pretty good job of just that. Read More >>

This could be the most deliciously geeky animated GIF ever created. Just in case you didn't believe that Pythagoras' Theorem worked, you now have no reason to doubt it whatsoever. [Chart Porn] Read More >>

If you think music repeats itself and that some songs sound exactly the freaking same, there could be a reason for that (well, other than piss poor artists being gobbled up by the machine): there's a finite limitation on how different songs can be. There is? Yep, says MATHS. Read More >>

Boarding a plane is like joining an assault course that demands you trample old people and bat small children out of the way you with your bare fists. Possibly. But perhaps not for much longer, because a Chinese mathematician claims to have found a far more efficient way to board an airplane. Read More >>

A team of researchers promises it can increase wireless bandwidth by an order or magnitude, without any new hardware whatsoever. All that's required, it claims, is a little extra maths. Read More >>

When you were at high school, maths was probably an uninspiring string of algebra you had to crunch through. Get to the cutting edge of computational fluid dynamics, though, and it all starts to look a hell of a lot more pretty. Read More >>

Some tastes just go together beautifully: lamb and rosemary; tomato and basil; cheddar and digestive biscuits. But despite a new wave of molecular gastronomy, human imagination can only go so far—which is why scientists are developing computational chemistry techniques to predict the flavor combinations of the future. Read More >>

Fake online reviews are a pain in the ass: they make interent shopping harder than it already is. But thankfully there are people out there who are developing ways of spotting and blocking rogue five-star reviews, and a new algorithm backed by Google seems to be the most effective yet. Read More >>

IBM's Minds of Modern Mathematics is a digital recreation of the classic 1960s Eames installation, which takes users on a visual journey through the more-interesting-than-it-sounds history of maths. Read More >>