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 ...

Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner once wrote that mathematics has the uncanny ability to describe the universe around us. That’s the spirit behind the new book “The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the ...

Math is "contemptible and vile." That's not from a disgruntled student. It's from a textbook. The author, 16th century mathematician Robert Recorde, nestled the line just after his preface, table of ...

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 ...

If you haven’t thought much about numbers much since that college calculus class, you might not think about how they’re relevant to everyday life, aside from maintaining your bank account and doing ...

Excerpted from "The Grapes of Math: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life." Numbers were invented to describe precise amounts: three teeth, seven days, twelve goats. When quantities are ...