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A Brief History of Our Obsession With Prime Numbers—and Where the Hunt Goes Next
Prime numbers have captivated mathematicians for thousands of years—and now cloud computing is helping them chase the biggest ...
Tech revolutionizes centuries-old search for prime numbers
For centuries, prime numbers have fascinated mathematicians, from ancient artifacts to modern tech. Now, cloud computing and ...
Live Science6mon
Babylonian tablet preserves student's 4,000-year-old geometry mistake
A small clay tablet from the site of Kish in Iraq reveals a student calculated the area of a triangle incorrectly 4,000 years ago. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...
The Conversation2mon
What was the first thing scientists discovered? A historian makes the case for Babylonian astronomy
One part of this was computing what the Babylonians called goal-years: the number of years it ... Instead, they used a sexagesimal system, with units of 60. Babylonian observations were so ...
Science News2mon
Readers talk science dioramas, an underwater volcano eruption, a zero-less number system
The math puzzle “Imagine there’s no zero” challenges readers to use mathematician James Foster’s number system, which uses T to avoid a zero symbol. Reader Bill Torcaso found the number ...