A new statistical study out of the UK’s University of Nottingham has produced an estimate of how many civilizations might exist within the Milky Way that are capable of communicating with one-another between the stars. Spoiler alert: it’s 36. In a statistical study much like the famous Drake equation, astrophysicistsread more
Pioneering NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson died on February 24, 2020, at the age of 101. Johnson’s calculations were critical in ensuring the success of the early Mercury and Apollo spaceflight missions. Along with fellow mathematicians Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, Johnson was the subject of the 2016 book Hidden Figures, documenting the contributionsread more
In a first for insect kind, a series of studies has found that simple honeybees can not only perform basic arithmetic—adding and subtracting the number one from a number provided to them—but they can also learn how to read symbols to learn what the numbers involved in the equation areread more
A new analysis of a 3,700-year-old Babylonian cuneiform tablet suggests that the ancient Babylonians were using an advanced form of trigonometry roughly a millennium before ancient Greek mathematicians recorded what is known as the Pytharoean theorem. In addition to the tablet’s antiquity, the tables inscribed on it also suggest that the Mesopotamians’ approach to this form of mathematics may be superior to the function we use today.
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