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 ...

Today’s teaching methods prioritize creative problem-solving over traditional formulas and equations, but these changes may be critical for the next generation. A group of children work together on a ...

Kinga Morsanyi receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (Centre for Early Mathematics Learning; ES/W002914/1). Carlo Tomasetto does not work for, consult, own shares in or ...

This story starts in the fourth dimension. Or, more specifically, with a British mathematician who, in the late 1800s, was intrigued by the fourth dimension and how to teach disinterested children ...

Kinga Morsanyi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

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 ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Whenever an impressive new technology comes ...

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 ...