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 ...

The notion of infinity is fundamentally beyond the human ability to comprehend, but that hasn’t stopped mathematicians from trying. So just what is infinity, and why is there more than one of them?

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 ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

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 ...