Imagine Earth were to shrink to the size of a marble. We might be in trouble, but the planet would continue its smooth course around the sun while the moon would maintain its orbit, circling Earth ...

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 ...

In the early 1970s mathematician Donald Knuth spent a sabbatical with his wife in Norway. The time was meant to be spent relaxing. Yet one night he woke up his partner in a state of agitation. He ...

When you move beyond trillions, there are some extremely mind-bending numbers, says Richard Fisher. Some of them are too large to fit in the mind – or even within the known Universe. What's the ...

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