In the late 19th century, Georg Cantor believed his new theory could help the Church understand the infinite nature of the ...

We recently wrote about how infinitely large sets are not all the same size as each other, but we were a bit vague about what we meant by a set. The people who invented set theory also started out ...

The equal sign is the bedrock of mathematics. It seems to make an entirely fundamental and uncontroversial statement: These things are exactly the same. But there is ...

Set theory is a mathematical abstract concerned with the grouping of sets of numbers that have commonality. For example, all even numbers make up a set, and all odd numbers comprise a set. All numbers ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last ...

Synthese, Vol. 192, No. 8, Special Section on HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF INFINITY (August 2015), pp. 2463-2488 (26 pages) We review different conceptions of the set-theoretic multiverse and evaluate ...

Three decades ago, a British documentary series named Connections aired, which showed viewers how various scientific achievements and discoveries were really interrelated, no matter how disparate they ...

Set theory is a broad area of mathematics, with many interconnecting themes, and our knowledge is developing rapidly. This international workshop will bring together young mathematicians, providing in ...

On a crisp fall New England day during my junior year of college, I was walking past a subway entrance when a math problem caught my eye. A man was standing near a few brainteasers he had scribbled on ...

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, ...