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 ...

Bernhard Riemann was a man with a hypothesis. He was confident that it was true, probably. But he didn’t prove it. And attempts over the last century and a half by others to prove it have failed. A ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

IT is interesting to compare the attitudes of the two most recent writers in English who deal with Euclidean geometry. Sir Thomas Heath, in the second edition of his three-volume translation of the ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Most of us learn some amount of Euclidean ...