The ancient Greeks wanted to believe that the universe could be described in its entirety using only whole numbers and the ratios between them — fractions, or what we now call rational numbers. But ...

The ancient scholar Hippasus of Metapontum was punished with death for his discovery of irrational numbers—or at least that’s the legend. What actually happened in the fifth century B.C.E. is far from ...

On Pi Day (March 14), NASA reminded us why we need only a small slice of the irrational number's infinite decimal places to explain most of the known universe. When you purchase through links on our ...

Originally defined as the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, pi — written as the Greek letter π — ...