See, squares and rectangles have straight lines, so it’s easy to determine their area. A circle, on the other hand, left ancient scholars scratching their heads. One solution: infinity.

Beale was a math major in college and said she thought “Infinity” captured the almost religious zeal of people who devote their lives to the subject. She thought the movie did a good job of ...

“Leaning Towards Infinity: How My Mother’s Apron Unfolds Into My Life,” by Sue Woolfe. Vintage Books. 393 pages. $24.95. If you tilt the number eight on its side, its voluptuous c… ...

So is “The Proof” (1997), the popular “Nova” documentary that captured the excitement of Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. “A Trip to Infinity” has moments of math magic.

In Math, we often talk of how a function behaves as a variable approaches limits at infinity. That is, if we let “x” take on larger and larger values, what happens to the value of “y” it creates? It ...