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 ...

“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 ...

Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. The origins of the decimal point, something millions of people use daily, may be much older than we first thought. It was ...

The Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–83) was all but blind when he moved to St Petersburg in 1766 for a second stint as the star of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences. He had lost vision ...

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 ...

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 ...

March 14 — a day you’re more likely than most others to eat — or throw — a pie and get a reduced price on your pizza. It’s all in celebration of pi (Greek letter π), the mathematical constant and ...

The narrow paths between the book-crammed shelves at the Department of the History of Mathematics in Wilbour Hall might induce claustrophobia. And the stacks of yellowing, oversized photocopies are ...