In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere's first new numeral system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik ...

The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

The p-adics form an infinite collection of number systems based on prime numbers. They’re at the heart of modern number theory. The rational numbers are the most familiar numbers: 1, -5, ½, and every ...

For centuries, mathematicians tried to solve problems by adding new values to the usual numbers. Now they’re investigating the unintended consequences of that tinkering. In 1847, Gabriel Lamé proved ...

Binary and hexadecimal numbers systems underpin the way modern computer systems work. Low-level interactions with hexadecimal (hex) and binary are uncommon in the world of Java programming, but ...