What do the integers have in common with the symmetries of a triangle? In the 19th century, mathematicians invented groups as an answer to this question. Mathematics started with numbers — clear, ...

Say you’re at a party with nine other people and everyone shakes everyone else’s hand exactly once. How many handshakes take place? This is the “handshake problem,” and it’s one of my favorites. As a ...

Recently Colin Walls had an article on this site about floating point math. Once it was common for embedded engineers to scoff at floats; many have told me they have no place in this space. That’s ...

For decades, a math puzzle has stumped the smartest mathematicians in the world. x 3 +y 3 +z 3 =k, with k being all the numbers from one to 100, is a Diophantine equation that's sometimes known as ...