Four thousand years ago, the Babylonians invented multiplication. Last month, mathematicians perfected it. On March 18, two researchers described the fastest method ever discovered for multiplying two ...

Methods similar to this go back thousands of years, at least to the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians. But is this really the best way to multiply two big numbers together? Around 1956, the famous ...

John Napier was a Scottish physicist, mathematician, and astronomer who usually gets the credit for inventing logarithms. But his contributions to simplifying mathematics and building shorthand ...

This summer, battle lines were drawn over a simple math problem: 8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = ? If you divide 8 by 2 first, you get 16, but if you multiply 2 by (2 + 2) first, you get 1. So, which answer is right?

A set of guidelines adopted by 45 states this year may turn children into "little mathematicians" who don't know how to do actual math. A few weeks ago, I wrote an article for TheAtlantic.com ...