Like many of the cultures it studies, the Department of History of Mathematics has had innovative leaders, a golden era and, inevitably, a fall from glory. This year could witness the end of a ...

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 ...

Around 1900 B.C., a student in the Sumerian city of Nippur, in what’s now Iraq, copied a multiplication table onto a clay tablet. Some 4,000 years later, that schoolwork survives, as do the student’s ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

For Wiles’s proof, you have to leave the algebra you know from school and enter more branched mathematical areas. In fact, ...

The cost of chronometers was likely a factor, writes David Lindsay Roberts, A&S '98 (PhD), in Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans Through History, published in October by ...

New Delhi: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar made a candid confession at the Conference on South Asia’s Manuscript Heritage and Mathematical Contributions that made the audience giggle. He is ...

The following is adapted from the introduction to “The Riddler: Fantastic Puzzles from FiveThirtyEight,” published by W. W. Norton & Co. It is in stores today! The world’s oldest collection of math ...