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 ...

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 ...

Use left and right arrow keys to seek audio. 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 ...

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 ...

Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this book, to buy it in print, or to download it as a free PDF. For many people, free association with the word “mathematics” would produce strong, ...

How is math education different now from, say, in President Abraham Lincoln’s day? A new online exhibition sheds light on math’s long history. The exhibition is a collaboration between the National ...

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 is only during the last fifty or sixty years that the history of mathematics has been systematically studied. In that time, however, the field has been gradually covered by an increasing number of ...