Would students take a stronger interest in math if they knew that an ancient African bone (from 20,000 B.C.) might be one of the world’s oldest known counting tools? Or that the work of Muslim ...

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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 ...

Ubiratan D’Ambrósio, an authority on the fields of ethnomathematics, math education and the history of mathematics, offers two talks at Bates College on Thursday, Sept. 18. At 4:30 p.m., D’Ambrosio ...

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 ...

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 ...

It’s a complaint many algebra teachers are familiar with, as more letters and symbols are introduced with progressively harder courses in mathematics. But why did the plus symbol emerge as the ...

There will never be another day like today — at least not until 2016. Today's date (Feb. 29) pops up on the calendar only on leap years, once almost every four years. It has taken millennia for our ...