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On March 14, or 3/14, mathematicians and other obscure-holiday aficionados celebrate Pi Day, honoring π, the Greek symbol representing an irrational number that begins with 3.14. Pi, as schoolteachers everywhere repeat, represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

I’ve been thinking a little more about how to go about cracking Scorpion Cipher S5. I mentioned before that I thought that the encipherer might well have started from an elegant-looking 26×16 grid filled with diagonally-downward families of shapes, and that this arrangement might offer codebreakers some additional kind of “spatial logic” to support their efforts that traditional ciphers don’t usually provide. From the letters that accompanied the ciphertexts, my inference is that the Scorpion is like a smart 12-year-old who has just ‘got’ the elegance of maths: but this leads me to a secondary inference that he/she probably didn’t...

In Daniel Tammet's mind, three is a dotted green crescent moon shape, one is a sort of white sunburst and four is a blue boomerang. Every number has a distinct color and shape, making the number pi, which begins with 3.14, unfold like a beautiful poem. For math enthusiasts around the world, March 14 (3-14) is Pi Day, honoring the number pi, which is the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle. On Thursday, Tammet is promoting France's first Pi Day celebration at the Palace of Discovery science museum in Paris. Tammet's relationship to this number is special: At...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Mathematicians at UCLA have discovered a 13-million-digit prime number, a long-sought milestone that makes them eligible for a $100,000 prize. The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. The number was verified by a different computer system running a different algorithm. "We're delighted," said UCLA's Edson Smith, the leader of the effort. "Now we're looking for the next one, despite the odds." It's the eighth Mersenne prime discovered at UCLA.

Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who tried to explain why it is so hard to make good weather forecasts and wound up unleashing a scientific revolution called chaos theory, died April 16 of cancer at his home in Cambridge. He was 90.A professor at MIT, Lorenz was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems. In the early 1960s, Lorenz realized that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere--or a model of the atmosphere--could trigger vast and often unsuspected results. These observations ultimately led him to formulate what...