Mathematics students face challenges with rational and irrational numbers. Understanding the principles and patterns simplifies this concept. Rational numbers can be fractions of integers. Irrational ...

When you hear the words "rational" and "irrational," they might bring to mind the relentlessly analytical Spock in "Star Trek." If you're a mathematician, however, you probably think of ratios between ...

The ancient scholar Hippasus of Metapontum was punished with death for his discovery of irrational numbers—or at least that’s the legend. What actually happened in the fifth century B.C.E. is far from ...

When you hear the words "rational" and "irrational," they might bring to mind the relentlessly analytical Spock in "Star Trek." If you're a mathematician, however, you probably think of ratios between ...

It has been assumed, on historical and psychological grounds, that the concept of irrational numbers faces two major intuitive obstacles: a) the difficulty to accept that two magnitudes (two line ...

Originally defined as the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, pi — written as the Greek letter π — ...

Making good decisions is not easy, and making the best possible (“optimal”) decisions is even harder. Instead, humans often use shortcuts and rules of thumb. From firm managers and policymakers to ...

In a previous post, we considered three of seven "irrational" habits of highly rational people. Here we consider the remaining four, as well as some suggestions for distinguishing the genuinely ...