Around 1900 B.C., a student in the Sumerian city of Nippur, in what’s now Iraq, copied a multiplication table onto a clay tablet. Some 4,000 years later, that schoolwork survives, as do the student’s ...

Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this book, to buy it in print, or to download it as a free PDF. §14.2 Algebraic Topology. Topology is generally introduced as I described it in §AG.6, ...

§RU.1 IN MY PRIMER ON THE SOLUTION of the general cubic, I mentioned the cube roots of 1 (§CQ.4). There are three of these little devils. Obviously 1 itself is a cube root of 1, since 1×1×1 = 1. The ...

Classicist Kuin (Lucian’s Laughing Gods) offers a enthralling intellectual history of Diogenes, the founder of Cynicism—a word derived from the Greek for “dog,” the moniker Continue reading » One Bad ...