A year after he started his Ph.D. in mathematics at McGill University, Matt Bowen had a problem. “I took my qualifying exams and did absolutely horribly on them,” he said. Bowen was sure that his ...

Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci, is best remembered today for introducing a sequence of numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5 and so on, each number after 0 and 1 ...

AN excellent way to see one’s own country, or one’s own century, is to visit another. While I was making just such a mental pilgrimage to the eighth century, a recent interest in unconventional ...

On his website andertoons.com, illustrator Mark Anderson has a cartoon in which a boy is handing his teacher an assignment. “To show how well I understand fractions,” he says, “I only did half of my ...

Between each pair of terms in this sequence is the amount the sequence is decreasing by. The 𝒏th term refers to a term's position in the sequence, for example, the first term has 𝒏 = 1, the second ...