It’s March 14, the day we irrationally celebrate the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Here’s a roundup from our archive of what we know about pi.

THE STATE OF SCIENCE: Fraud is the exception not the rule in science, but it happens, as one recent high-profile case showed. How does this occur, and what can mathematics bring to the equation? Jon Borwein…

Perhaps the only positive note that can be sounded on the Australian science literacy survey results, released on Wednesday by the Australian Academy of Science (AAS), is they are somewhat better than…

So we have a problem for you. Take a moment to steady yourself, maybe sharpen your pencil. Don’t unpack your calculator, and leave your phone to one side. This one will be purely mental – a spot of addition…

Let’s talk numbers for a moment. The moon is approximately 384,000 kilometres away, and the sun is approximately 150 million kilometres away. The mean distance between Earth and the sun is known as the…

There’s been plenty of commentary recently on the “numeracy crisis” threatening the economies of many developed nations, including Australia. A 2009 report by the National Academies in the US was not the…

In one respect, science and religion have been largely reconciled since the 19th century, when geologists such as Charles Lyell recognised the evidence for a very old Earth. Within a few decades, most…

During a lunch in the summer of 1950, physicists Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and Herbert York were chatting about a recent New Yorker cartoon depicting aliens abducting trash cans in flying saucers. Suddenly…

In recent weeks, two truly major results have been announced in the realm of (analytic) number theory, namely the mathematics of integers in general and of prime numbers in particular. Number theory, as…

Few of us have the time or expertise to sift through all of the scientific papers published every day to determine which research is important and relevant to our lives. In this sense, science journalists…