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 ...

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 ...

Lynda Colgan receives funding from SSHRC, NSERC, The Council of Ontario Directors of Education, The Ministry of Education for the Province of Ontario, The Mathematics Knowledge Network (The Fields ...