Growing up in Hungary during WWI, Erdos tried school but chafed at the rules and convinced his mother that he should study at home. He was fascinated by numbers from an early age, and by the time he was 20, he was known as The Magician from Budapest. Unable to do common tasks such as cooking, laundry, or driving, he spent his adult life flying around the world, staying with other mathematicians, and working collaboratively on challenging math problems....

Looks at landmark mathematical discoveries over the past 2500 years by such mathematicians as Euclid, Isaac Newton, Pierre Simon de Laplace, Gerog Cantor, and Alan Turing.

A collection of some of the most eloquent science writing by over sixty scientists and science commentators.

In 1202, a young Italian man published one of the most influential books of all time, introducing modern arithmetic to Western Europe. Though written in scholarly Latin, Fibonacci's book was the first European text to recognize the power of numbers, and to aim them at the world of commerce. His books made him the greatest mathematician of the Middle Ages, though he is best known today for his "Fibonacci sequence" of numbers which appears with great...

Growing up poor in Madras, India, Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar earns admittance to Cambridge University during WWI, where he becomes a pioneer in mathematical theories with the guidance of his professor, G.H. Hardy.

In the World War II era, Geoffrey Pyke was described as one of the world's great minds--to rank alongside Einstein. He was an inventor, adventurer, polymath, and unlikely hero of both world wars. He earned a fortune on the stock market, founded an influential pre-school, wrote a bestseller, and came up with the idea for t he US and Canadian Special Forces. In 1942 he convinced Winston Churchill to build an aircraft carrier out of reinforced ice....

The woman at the heart of the New York Times bestseller and Oscar-winning film "Hidden Figures" shares her personal journey from child prodigy in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia to NASA human computer and her integral role in the early years of the U.S. space program. In 2015, at the age of ninety-seven, Johnson became a global celebrity for her pioneering work as a mathematician on NASA's first flight into space. In her memoir Johnson provides...

You've likely heard of the historic Apollo 13 moon landing. But do you know about the mathematical genius who made sure that Apollo 13 returned safely home? As a child, Katherine Johnson loved to count. She counted the steps on the road, the number of dishes and spoons she washed in the kitchen sink, everything! Boundless, curious, and excited by calculations, young Katherine longed to know as much as she could about math, about the universe. From...