IN a recent number of NATURE (June 30) there appeared a review of a book by G. Mannoury on the philosophy of mathematics, and the reviewer emphasised a statement of the author to the effect that the ...

Virtual reality can take you to some far-out places — mountaintops, distant cities and even fantastical game worlds. A team of artists and mathematicians is now adding to that list: universes where ...

Everyone learns the number one rule about triangles in high school: the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. But did you know that sometimes they don't? Triangles are much more interesting than ...

Reintroduction : View from the twenty-first century -- Augmenting a 1983 history of the fourth dimension in culture and art (1900-1950) : X-rays and ether physics as the context for the "fourth ...

Geometry may be one of the oldest branches of mathematics, but it’s much more than a theoretical subject. It’s part of our everyday lives, says Professor Jennifer Taback, and key to understanding many ...

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. This is one of the basic principles of Euclidean geometry. But we live on a spherical Earth, so we cannot travel the straight line path ...

In 1847, an eccentric British mathematician named Oliver Byrne released a new edition of Euclid’s famous mathematical treatise, The Elements of Geometry. Byrne added a rather longwinded but ultimately ...

Euclidean geometry is a mathematical well-known system attributed to the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria. Euclid's text Elements was the first systematic discussion of geometry. It has been ...

If you enjoyed this article, I’d like to ask for your support. Scientific American has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in ...