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 ...

THE history of mathematics has an image problem. It is often presented as a meeting of minds among ancient Greeks who became masters of logic. Pythagoras, Euclid and their pals honed the tools for ...

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 ...

Archaeologists working in northern Mesopotamia say they have uncovered visual patterns that look a lot like structured counting, even though no written numerals existed at the time. The claim is bold: ...

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 ...

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 ...