The word “algorithm” can sometimes seem like a word designed to scare people away from math classes, much like the words “calculus”, “Fourier transform”, or “engineering exam”. But in reality it’s ...

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 ...

Everyone agreed on the first step: Solve inside the parentheses, for 2+2=4. But after that, people split down two paths. Some multiplied first, while others divided, leading to different answers—1 and ...

For all of the recent strides we’ve made in the math world—like a supercomputer finally solving the Sum of Three Cubes problem that puzzled mathematicians for 65 years—we’re forever crunching ...

Young students around the world struggle to memorize multiplication tables, but the effort pays off. Cognitive scientists say that learning 6 x 7 and 8 x 9 by heart frees up the brain’s working memory ...

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?