When you hear the words "rational" and "irrational," they might bring to mind the relentlessly analytical Spock in "Star Trek." If you're a mathematician, however, you probably think of ratios between ...

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Real numbers are, in fact, pretty much any number that you can think of. This can include whole numbers or integers, fractions, rational numbers and irrational numbers. Real numbers can be positive or ...

When my students grow too dependent on their calculators, I ask them to find a number that, when multiplied by itself, gives them 2. Students quickly see that since 1² = 1 and 2² = 4, the answer has ...

Martin Kruskal, a mathematician at Rutgers university in New Jersey, has two brothers, both of whom are also mathematicians. When my older brother’s oldest child was five, Kruskal recalls, he argued ...