Amicable Numbers are definitive proof that mathematicians are very inventive, but too often bored. When you put both these qualities together, you get a bunch of people making up new kinds of numbers ...

The Pythagoreans of ancient Greece were fascinated by whole numbers. One particular interest involved what we now call amicable numbers. Amicable numbers come in pairs in which each number is the sum ...

Yet again, it’s hard, in a time of political dustups and uncertainty, to focus on things mathematical for this column. In a time, that is, when such dustups dominate the news and our thoughts. I refer ...

The Monthly publishes articles, as well as notes and other features, about mathematics and the profession. Its readers span a broad spectrum of mathematical interests, and include professional ...

When UCLA mathematician Terence Tao appeared on The Colbert Report in November 2014, viewers learned that prime numbers can be "sexy"—if they’re six apart, that is, like 5 and 11. Though sexy may be ...

Amicable pairs of numbers are bound by a rule—which is that the sum of each number’s respective factors should be the other number in the pair ...