For centuries, prime numbers have captured the imaginations of mathematicians, who continue to search for new patterns that help identify them and the way they’re distributed among other numbers.

Fourteen years ago, the mathematicians Dusa McDuff and Felix Schlenk stumbled upon a hidden geometric garden that is only now beginning to flower. The pair were interested in a certain kind of oblong ...

The following is an excerpt from Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics, by Eugenia Cheng Mathematics can be thought of as many things: a language, a tool, a game. It might ...