The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Mathematics started with numbers—clear, concrete, intuitive. Over the last two centuries, however, it has become a far more abstract ...

If you haven’t thought much about numbers much since that college calculus class, you might not think about how they’re relevant to everyday life, aside from maintaining your bank account and doing ...

Mathematics is one of the oldest disciplines of study. For all its antiquity, however, it is a modern, rapidly growing field. Only 70 years ago, mathematics might have been said to consist of algebra, ...

I’m a zero at mental arithmetic. It’s true—I struggle with this skill—but I want to focus on the phrase itself. In our language, we often equate zero with something negative. But zero is the only real ...

One of the few things that unites Americans across the political spectrum in this age of partisan polarization is disdain for modern math instruction. From the far left to the far right, you can find ...

“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 ...