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 ...

The origins of the decimal point, something millions of people use daily, may be much older than we first thought. It was initially considered to have originated in 1593, having been used by German ...

The quest to make mathematics rigorous has a long and spotty history — one mathematicians can learn from as they push to ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

“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 ...

New Delhi: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar made a candid confession at the Conference on South Asia’s Manuscript Heritage and Mathematical Contributions that made the audience giggle. He is ...

THE two volumes of this history (the first of which was noticed in NATURE of November 15, 1924) deal with the subject from two different aspects. The first volume, described as a “General Survey,” is ...