For some people, math can be a necessary headache. Yes, algorithms guide countless aspects of daily life. There are tips to calculate and hours to count. But unless someone's a specialist, they'll ...

The Joseph Henry Press, an imprint of the National Academies Press, was created with the goal of making books on science, technology, and health more widely available to professionals and the public.

Every week a little dash of math and statistics floats into my mailbox. I make no claims to be a mathematician, but I've learned a great deal from my regular injection of numerate thinking provided by ...

April is Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month—a time to celebrate teaching math, which can be, as experts say, a “hard sell.” I spoke with Sean Nank, a professor of teaching and learning at the ...

Interestingly, when you look at them it isn't hard for those of us who are not mathematicians to see why. The former explains complex elements within a simple framework. The latter is long and messy.

A mathematician, the Hungarian lover of numbers Paul Erdos once said, is a device for converting coffee into theorems. Here, then, are a few glimpses into the Truth Factory. The Mathematical Sciences ...

Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. Symmetry also has an aesthetic meaning, although this is ...

Math is exceedingly useful in physics, engineering and everywhere else, but let us not forget: math is also beautiful. Take the spiral, for instance. Simple mathematical spirals have been the focus of ...

Let the physical basis of a social economy be given— or, to take a broader view of the matter, of a society. According to all tradition and experience human beings have a characteristic way of ...

I SAW the film A Beautiful Mind on an aeroplane, dubbed into German with subtitles in Spanish. Though I struggled to make sense of it, it was clear this wasn’t a detailed exposition of the ...