It’s surprisingly difficult to prove one of the most basic properties of a number: whether it can be written as a fraction. A ...

All of history’s most brilliant mathematicians, including Sir Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Rene Descartes, worked on this problem in one form or another. In the end, it was ...

The brilliant Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler had cut his teeth on it and failed to solve it. Now Apéry, a French mathematician who was relatively unknown and in his 60s at the time ...