“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 history of mathematics has an image problem. It is often presented as a meeting of minds among ancient Greeks who became masters of logic. Pythagoras, Euclid and their pals honed the tools for ...

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 ...

One of the biggest mathematical achievements in human history has to do with the origin of nothing—or zero, to be more specific. Researchers at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library recently ...

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 ...

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 ...

In 1843, William Rowan Hamilton had a four-dimensional flash of insight that still shapes our three-dimensional world. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.