This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Julia Robinson was born on December 8, 1919.

Baltimore — IN 1975, a San Diego woman named Marjorie Rice read in her son’s Scientific American magazine that there were only eight known pentagonal shapes that could entirely tile, or tessellate, a ...

We can all enjoy the elegance of brilliant logical arguments and appreciate the beauty of mathematical structures and symmetries without being skilled creators of new theorems. Many people derive ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Golomb also drew my attention to a class of ...

Math has long been a bane to American students. One way to counteract the difficulty is to discover the subject’s playful side. In this excerpt, a math professor reflects on recreational math and the ...

Adam DeHollander, of Byron Center, a senior at Jenison International Academy, joined an exclusive group this year. He competed in the popular math competition called MathCON. He took an online ...

Re “The Importance of Recreational Math,” by Manil Suri (Op-Ed, Oct. 12): As a high school math teacher, I don’t recall ever having a “recreational math” lesson when I was in school. I happened to ...

Recreational math may sound like an oxymoron, but it is David Nacin’s guiding principle. Nacin is a former college deejay, yoga devotee and a 14-year mathematics professor at William Paterson ...

Weekend Edition's own "Math Guy" Keith Devlin calls the late Martin Gardner the greatest "math guy" of all time. As Devlin tells NPR's Scott Simon, Gardner had little formal mathematics training. And ...