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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

How is math education different now from, say, in President Abraham Lincoln’s day? A new online exhibition sheds light on math’s long history. The exhibition is a collaboration between the National ...

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 ...

A tablet that dates back some 3700 years has been found to be the oldest example of applied geometry in the history of mathematics. Australian mathematician Dr. Daniel Mansfield from UNSW Science's ...

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 ...