Would students take a stronger interest in math if they knew that an ancient African bone (from 20,000 B.C.) might be one of the world’s oldest known counting tools? Or that the work of Muslim ...

While American children once learned to add by reading a poster of animals and birds, they do it now by playing games on computers. Each step in between—whether it be a box of blocks or exercises ...

Jeremiah Bartz owns shares in Nvidia. A shard of smooth bone etched with irregular marks dating back 20,000 years puzzled archaeologists until they noticed something unique – the etchings, lines like ...

The history of math is murky, predating any written records. When did humans first grasp the basic concept of a number? What about size and magnitude, or form and shape? In my math history courses and ...

When the greatest mathematician alive unveils a vision for the next century of research, the math world takes note. That's exactly what happened in 1900 at the International Congress of Mathematicians ...

It’s a complaint many algebra teachers are familiar with, as more letters and symbols are introduced with progressively harder courses in mathematics. But why did the plus symbol emerge as the ...

Martin Weissman receives funding from the Simons Foundation for collaboration in mathematics. On March 20, American-Canadian mathematician Robert Langlands received the Abel Prize, celebrating ...

A while ago, I got interested in mathematics, mostly because I had done so poorly at it in school. I’m being coy. I didn’t do poorly; I pretty much failed. I only passed by cheating. Anyway, I bought ...

Mathematics is traditionally a solitary science. In 1986 Andrew Wiles withdrew to his study for seven years to prove Fermat’s theorem. The resulting proofs are often difficult for colleagues to ...