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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Mathematics is the science ...

Dunning explores how mathematical notation is a social, world-building technology. It’s natural to think of math as being ...

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “the music of the spheres,” your first thought probably wasn’t about mathematics. But in its historical origin, the music of the spheres actually was all about math. In ...

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 ...

Figuring out a word problem. Calculating area and perimeter. Finding the measure of an unknown angle. All these tasks, and more, draw on an essential foundation of math knowledge, said Brian Bushart, ...