Would students take a stronger interest in math if they knew that an ancient African bone (from 20,000 B.C.) might be one of the world’s oldest known counting tools? Or that the work of Muslim ...

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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 ...

Ubiratan D’Ambrósio, an authority on the fields of ethnomathematics, math education and the history of mathematics, offers two talks at Bates College on Thursday, Sept. 18. At 4:30 p.m., D’Ambrosio ...

If you haven’t thought much about numbers much since that college calculus class, you might not think about how they’re relevant to everyday life, aside from maintaining your bank account and doing ...

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 hallways of math and science history are overflowing with the achievements of white men, from Sir Isaac Newton to Steve Jobs; their faces are printed into elementary school textbooks everywhere, ...

As a young math student, Rachel Eng memorized formulas and theorems, but she never learned about the mathematicians who developed them. Nor did she hear about the controversies and dramas that ...