I am not a mathematician by any stretch of any imagination, so I don’t know if this an example of pop mathematics or not but I find this interesting even so.
Now, I’m not sure what those deeply entrenched in the various mathematical disciplines think about this (but they seem to be a bit off anyway) but I’ve just read about a computer science professor in the UK that has solved the equation 0/0 by proposing a new number: nullity. Nullity lies off the linear number line (-∞…-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3… ∞). Just the idea of a number off the linear line strikes me as brilliant.
The STS portion of my brain starts firing at the idea of a new number. It’s a little mind-boggling, but did this number always exist? Was it just “created”? These kinds of ideas are precisely why I love academia: it takes creativity and thinking beyond the established rules to think of something like this.