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 ...

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 ...

To carry out their calculations, merchants in the early 13th century used an abacus or a system called finger reckoning. Commerce changed when Leonardo of Pisa — known today as Fibonacci — published ...

Number System and Arithmetic are the two most basic, but extremely important, topics of Quantitative Aptitude. They make the foundation of one’s QA skills and go a long way in making one do well in ...

IF YOU were forced to learn long division at school, you might have had cause to curse whoever invented arithmetic. A wearisome whirl of divisors and dividends, of bringing the next digit down and ...

The p-adics form an infinite collection of number systems based on prime numbers. They’re at the heart of modern number theory. The rational numbers are the most familiar numbers: 1, -5, ½, and every ...