Ultrafinitism, a philosophy that rejects the infinite, has long been dismissed as mathematical heresy. But it is also ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Have you even thought deeply about Buzz Lightyear's famous catchphrase from the "Toy Story" movies? Probably not. But maybe you've sometimes looked up at the night sky and wondered about the nature of ...

Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is so widely accepted that modern mathematicians hardly think about it. But believing in its core ...

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 ...

Numbers rarely make headlines, but pi has a habit of doing exactly that. The famous constant, which is best known from school math as 3.14—never actually ends, and its digits never repeat their ...