Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107 and — wait for it — 47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? If you’re stumped, you’re not alone. These are the first five busy ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: The Busy Beaver number, or BB(n), represents a mathematical problem that tries to calculate the longest possible run-time of a Turing machine ...

Once upon a time, over 40 years ago, a horde of computer scientists descended on the West German city of Dortmund. They were competing to catch an elusive quarry — only four of its kind had ever been ...

Amateur mathematicians are closing in on an unimaginably huge number – one so large that it brushes up on the edge of what is even knowable within the framework of modern mathematics. It all stems ...