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 ...

The origins of the decimal point, something millions of people use daily, may be much older than we first thought. It was initially considered to have originated in 1593, having been used by German ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

The speed at which artificial intelligence is gaining in mathematical ability has taken many by surprise. It is rewriting what it means to be a mathematician ...

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 ...

“HIGHER Mathematics,” edited by Mansfield Merriman and Robert S. Woodward, is a text-book for classical and engineering colleges, and is a work containing 600 pages. Each chapter is written by a ...

Wilbour Hall looks like the kind of building that houses other civilizations, the kind of old-fashioned brick house you might imagine Indiana Jones teaching in. And for almost 40 years, it was exactly ...