Eureka moments in Syracuse
In a charming Sicilian museum you can test the theories of antiquity’s greatest mathematician
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
Civilisation made concrete
The ancient Assyrians deserve to be remembered for being pioneering builders and engineers
Is this the real life or just fantasy?
It may not be possible to know if we are living in a simulation — but perhaps we don’t need certainty
Escaping the Moscow ghetto
How a brilliant young Russian mathematician was blocked by blatant Soviet anti-Semitism
The heroes who came up with zero
‘Arabic’ numerals came to Europe from India — but ancient Sumerians invented them
An Italian take on time and space
Events in the quantum world do not form an orderly queue but crowd around in a chaotic fashion
New Year confusions
We celebrated our New Year on January 1 but the Chinese will do so this month. Why the difference?
Acting the goat with the Greeks
Innumeracy at the top of European politics beggared Greece and may now vitiate Brexit negotiations
Indiana Jones and the Table of Babel
An ancient Mesopotamian tablet shows Babylonian trigonometrists had long anticipated the Greeks
Rediscovering a Roman Thought
Lucretius’s poem On the Nature of Things was written in 50 BC, yet remains as startling as ever
Dating Dilemmas
Trying to change the calendar to accommodate religious festivals has been a centuries-old minefield
Time To Revisit The Two Cultures
The divide between the arts and sciences will never be fully resolved. But the gap may be narrowing