Ten Great Essays about Mathematics

What Is Math? by Dan Falk - A teenager asked that age-old question on TikTok, creating a viral backlash, and then, a thoughtful scientific debate…

How Natural is Numeracy? by Philip Ball - Where does our number sense come from? Is it a neural capacity we are born with — or is it a product of our culture?

Infinity Plus One, and Other Surreal Numbers by Polly Shulman - In the whole intellectual history of humankind, says Kruskal, there have been only a handful of genuine totally ordered number systems: the naturals, the integers, the rationals, the cardinals, the ordinals and now the surreals.

Encounter with the Infinite by Robert Schneider - How did a minimally trained, isolated mathematician, with little more than an out-of-date elementary textbook, anticipate some of the deepest theoretical problems of mathematics—including concepts discovered only after his death?

The Mind-Bending Math Behind Spot It! by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie - The simple matching game has some deceptively complex mathematics behind the scenes

A Most Profound Math Problem by Alexander Nazaryan - On August 6, 2010, a computer scientist named Vinay Deolalikar published a paper with a name as concise as it was audacious: “P ≠ NP.”

The Chaos of the Dice by Raffi Khatchadourian - A backgammon hustler’s quest to gain an edge…

Titans of Mathematics Clash Over Epic Proof of ABC Conjecture by Erica Klarreich - Two mathematicians have found what they say is a hole at the heart of a proof that has convulsed the mathematics community for nearly six years…

Your Handy Postcard-sized Guide to Statistics by Tim Harford - The case for everyday practical numeracy has never been more urgent…

The Most Irrational Number by Jordan Ellenberg - The golden ratio is even more astonishing than Dan Brown and Pepsi thought