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Napier’s Bones: The Calculating Rods That Multiplied Before Machines DidIn 1617, a dying Scottish laird described a handful of ivory rods in his final book. Those rods became the pocket calculator Europe carried for the next two centuries.

Alexander Graham Bell’s Tetrahedral Kites: The Fractal He Flew Before It Had a NameAfter the telephone, Bell spent years on a Nova Scotia hilltop sending red-silk pyramids into the sky. He stopped enlarging the kite and started copying it — and flew a Sierpiński tetrahedron decades before mathematics named it.

What Is Mathematics Good For?Nobody loves music because it is useful. Nobody plays football because sport is good for you. A manifesto on why mathematics is good for nothing — and, for that very reason, good for everything.

Marie Curie's Radioactive NotebooksMarie Curie's laboratory notebooks are still radioactive a hundred and thirty years later. The National Library of France keeps them in lead-lined boxes. To turn the pages, you sign a waiver first.

The House That Calculus Paid ForWhat does the author of the world's best-selling calculus textbook do with the money? He builds a five-storey concert hall into the slope of a Toronto ravine, with door handles cast in the shape of the integral sign, and lives inside it.

Here’s Looking at Euclid: Helen Friel Folds Byrne’s Proofs into PaperIn 1847 Oliver Byrne turned Euclid’s proofs into coloured figures. A hundred and sixty-five years later, paper engineer Helen Friel lifted those same figures off the page and folded them into three dimensions.