A year after he started his Ph.D. in mathematics at McGill University, Matt Bowen had a problem. “I took my qualifying exams and did absolutely horribly on them,” he said. Bowen was sure that his ...

Though generations of schoolchildren have cursed arithmetic, the world was a much more inconvenient place without it. Before the advent of modern arithmetic in the 13th century, basic calculations ...

AN excellent way to see one’s own country, or one’s own century, is to visit another. While I was making just such a mental pilgrimage to the eighth century, a recent interest in unconventional ...

To carry out their calculations, merchants in the early 13th century used an abacus or a system called finger reckoning. Commerce changed when Leonardo of Pisa — known today as Fibonacci — published ...

Researchers set out to test whether bees could do math, building on a groundbreaking finding that bees understand the concept of zero. The new study shows bees can be taught to recognize colors as ...

IF YOU were forced to learn long division at school, you might have had cause to curse whoever invented arithmetic. A wearisome whirl of divisors and dividends, of bringing the next digit down and ...

A new proof demonstrates the power of arithmetic dynamics, an emerging discipline that combines insights from number theory and dynamical systems. Joseph Silverman remembers when he began connecting ...

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. During the 1950s, the Belgian teacher ...

MANY people find large numbers difficult to understand and hard to appreciate. Hence they do not follow with ease many of the interesting results which have, during the last quarter of a century, ...