A set of the six sides of a die matches up one-to-one with a set of red shoes, helping illustrate Georg Cantor's set theorem. Image courtesy of GBH/NOVA It can be easy to take math for granted. But ...

Albert Einstein famously said: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe.” The notion of infinity has been pondered by the greatest minds over the ...

Several years ago, I tried to explain infinity to a class of fifth graders. In the story that I told them, I was preparing to eat a piece of cake when a friend walked in on me. Being polite, I gave ...

For sheer brilliance, it was hard to beat John von Neumann. An architect of the modern computer and inventor of game theory, von Neumann was legendary, above all, for his lightning-fast mental ...