A year after he started his Ph.D. in mathematics at McGill University, Matt Bowen had a problem. “I took my qualifying exams and did absolutely horribly on them,” he said. Bowen was sure that his ...

AN excellent way to see one’s own country, or one’s own century, is to visit another. While I was making just such a mental pilgrimage to the eighth century, a recent interest in unconventional ...

Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci, is best remembered today for introducing a sequence of numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5 and so on, each number after 0 and 1 ...

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 ...

IF YOU were forced to learn long division at school, you might have had cause to curse whoever invented arithmetic. A wearisome whirl of divisors and dividends, of bringing the next digit down and ...

In the present operation system, the length of numbers of the significand of the numeral register group and the number of operation Words of micro instructions can be switched on the hardware by ...