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 ...

Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. The origins of the decimal point, something millions of people use daily, may be much older than we first thought. It was ...

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 ...

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 ...

The narrow paths between the book-crammed shelves at the Department of the History of Mathematics in Wilbour Hall might induce claustrophobia. And the stacks of yellowing, oversized photocopies are ...

The symbols we use every day have fascinating and surprisingly recent origins, explains author Joseph Mazur in his new book A few years ago friends and I were talking about the origins of written ...

In Trinidad and Ghana, it’s known as susu. In Senegal and Benin it’s tontines. In Nigeria, where it began in the 1700s, it’s esusu. Whatever you call it, this system of large-scale money-pooling for ...