It’s not often a math paper goes viral, but a new preprint from a theoretical physicist at Poland’s Jagiellonian University has well and truly bucked the trend. Why? Because it seems to reduce all of ...

To learn math, students must build a mental toolbox of facts and procedures needed for different problems. But students who can recall these foundational facts in isolation often struggle to use them ...

When one thinks of mathematics, the thought that comes to most peoples’ heads is solving an equation and getting a correct answer. That is the case with many mathematical theorems, including one of ...

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When it comes to teaching math, a debate has persisted for decades: How, and to what degree, should algorithms be a focus of learning math? The step-by-step procedures are among the most debated ...

In Central Falls, R.I., teachers are trying new strategies that move away from focusing on “key words,” the traditional, simplistic approach that often leads younger students astray CENTRAL FALLS, R.I ...

The word “algorithm” can sometimes seem like a word designed to scare people away from math classes, much like the words “calculus”, “Fourier transform”, or “engineering exam”. But in reality it’s ...

In the third century BCE, Apollonius of Perga asked how many circles one could draw that would touch three given circles at exactly one point each. It would take 1,800 years to prove the answer: eight ...

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, ...