"Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare," wrote the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. And ever since Euclid's time, lovers of mathematics have marveled at its beauty, even if they have glimpsed it, as St. Vincent Millay wrote later in her sonnet, "once...

Some mathematicians derive aesthetic pleasure from their work, and from mathematics in general. They express this pleasure by describing mathematics (or, at least, some aspect of mathematics) as beautiful. Sometimes mathematicians describe mathematics...

Byline: Raymond Petersen, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866) published nine scientific articles during his short life. Two were major intellectual blockbusters. The first, presented in 1854 at Gottingen University, qualified him for a tenured position on that school's soon-to-become...

The Universe and the Teacup The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty K.C. Cole. 1998; 214 pp. $22. Harcourt, Brace & Company. For a book devoted to math, Universe contains nary a number. If that's a sop to the math-phobic, I protest,...