Ambiguity and its cousins, contradiction and paradox, are everywhere in mathematics, both in content and thinking. Strangely, the subject that appears to be the very paradigm of reason, and that is ...

We recently wrote about how infinitely large sets are not all the same size as each other, but we were a bit vague about what we meant by a set. The people who invented set theory also started out ...

No less a mind than Bertrand Russell, of Principia Mathematica fame, was responsible for this paradox, which opened a hole in math. It’s those barbers. The Barber Paradox shows that barbers are not to ...

If you wear glasses you’ve probably experienced the problem of being unable to find your glasses because you’re not wearing your glasses. There’s also the conundrum of needing to drink coffee before ...

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