I’m a zero at mental arithmetic. It’s true—I struggle with this skill—but I want to focus on the phrase itself. In our language, we often equate zero with something negative. But zero is the only real ...

What better time to contemplate the conundrum that is zero than the start of a new year? Zero is a fairly new concept in human history and even more recent as a number. It wasn't until around the 7th ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers ...