The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

The Kakeya conjecture predicts how much room you need to point a line in every direction. In one number system after another — with one important exception — mathematicians have been proving it true.

Some of us might solve crossword puzzles or Sudoko games to exercise our minds, but [Nathan Nichols] plays with exotic number systems to keep the brain cells in shape. He wrote the Hanoi C99 library ...