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.

It’s impossible to directly test whether lottery computer-generated numbers are truly random without gaining access to the systems, Molzon said. However, it is simple to compute probabilities that a ...