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 ...

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 you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Originally defined as the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, pi — ...