The Kansas Statehouse dome. Long-ago effort to legislate the math of circles offers lesson for legislators today. The Wichita Eagle file photo The celebration of Pi Day this past week marked the ...

Mathematics students face challenges with rational and irrational numbers. Understanding the principles and patterns simplifies this concept. Rational numbers can be fractions of integers. Irrational ...

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, ...

Irrational numbers are numbers that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers. This is opposed to rational numbers, like 2, 7, one-fifth and -13/9, which can be, and are, expressed as the ...

A rational number can be written exactly in the form \(\frac{a}{b}\), where 𝑎 and 𝑏 are integers, while an irrational number cannot.

When my students grow too dependent on their calculators, I ask them to find a number that, when multiplied by itself, gives them 2. Students quickly see that since 1² = 1 and 2² = 4, the answer has ...

The ancient scholar Hippasus of Metapontum was punished with death for his discovery of irrational numbers—or at least that’s the legend. What actually happened in the fifth century B.C.E. is far from ...