Barbie caught a lot of flack back in the ’90s for declaring, “Math class is tough!” Today we find ourselves in the disorienting position of defending her. We recently got a note from an anonymous ...

Everyone knows that arithmetic is true: 2 + 2 = 4. But surprisingly, we don't know why it's true. By stepping outside the box of our usual way of thinking about numbers, my colleagues and I have ...

From classrooms to kitchen tables, debates about math education are never far away. Should teachers drill multiplication facts or encourage creative strategies to solve problems? The answer, ...

A key part—though surely not the only part—of early-grades math is ensuring students get the basic arithmetic functions down and, beyond that, making sure they’re able to swiftly and automatically ...

Consider this sequence of numbers: 5, 7, 9. Can you spot the pattern? Here’s another with the same pattern: 15, 19, 23. One more: 232, 235, 238. “Three equally spaced things,” says Raghu Meka, a ...

The 30-year-old math sensation Peter Scholze is now one of the youngest Fields medalists for “the revolution that he launched in arithmetic geometry.” In the run-up to the presentation of the Fields ...

Everyone knows that arithmetic is true: 2 + 2 = 4. But surprisingly, we don’t know why it’s true. By stepping outside the box of our usual way of thinking about numbers, my colleagues and I have ...