From rockets to cancer research, here’s how the number pi is embedded in our lives

Every year, math nerds and dessert enthusiasts unite to celebrate Pi Day on March 14, a date whose digits represent the first ...

You Can Approximate Pi by Dropping Needles on the Floor

In this simulation, 66 of the 100 needles crossed a line (you can count ’em). Using this number, we get a value of pi at 3.0303—which is not 3.14—but it's not terrible for just 100 needles. With ...
Global Investigative Journalism Network

Confront Them With the Numbers: This Former Physicist’s Path to Investigative Data Journalism

Anna Behrend is a self-taught data journalist who has found in data-driven reporting and visualization a way to combine her academic background in science with her creative interests.

Student serves up fresh solutions to the pancake problem

David Cutler is in the spotlight for his work on a tasty-sounding mathematics problem. In January, the New York Times featured a research paper authored by Cutler and Neil Sloane, the founder of The ...

Cracking the code: How a “prediction machine” is resurrecting the Singapore Stone

Some years ago, my linguistic research team and I started to develop a computational tool aimed at reconstructing the text of ...