Here, count with me: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, T, 11, 12 … Oh, what’s that? You write ten with “zero”? Fair enough. Zero, we have been told, is the ...

The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

The humble decimal point may have been invented about 150 years before we previously thought. Experts had previously credited German mathematician Christopher Clavius for the innovation, but according ...

Almost 30 years ago, a group of Kaktovik students invented a numbering system that reflected the way they counted in Iñupiaq and made math more intuitive for them. Soon, anyone in the world will be ...

We know a lot about how babies learn to talk, and youngsters learn to read. Now scientists are unraveling the earliest building blocks of math—and what children know about numbers as they begin first ...

Imagine winding the hour hand of a clock back from 3 o’clock to noon. Mathematicians have long known how to describe this rotation as a simple multiplication: A number representing the initial ...

As I told my class on Thursday, the theme of the first week of our math history course was “easy algebra is hard in base 60.” We started the semester in ancient Mesopotamia, trying to understand ...