Plantlike designs on pottery made almost 8,000 years ago may be the earliest evidence yet of mathematical thinking. Many of the flower decorations painted on pottery by an ancient culture in northern ...

THE history of mathematics has an image problem. It is often presented as a meeting of minds among ancient Greeks who became masters of logic. Pythagoras, Euclid and their pals honed the tools for ...

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 ...

On a set of broken clay bowls from northern Mesopotamia, delicate flower patterns have turned out to be something far more radical than decoration. New analysis of this ancient art suggests that early ...

Andrea Breard, professor of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg (FAU) in Erlangen, Germany, speaks at the International Symposium on Young Sinologists and Mutual Learning Among ...

Add zero and one to get one, one and one to get two, one and two to get three, two and three to get five. Most of us know this—that each successive number is the sum of the two numbers that came ...

In October 2015 my time training mathematics teachers at a French high school in Port Vila, Vanuatu, was coming to an end. The principal invited me to share kava, a traditional drink in the country.

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If you’ve ever heard the phrase “the music of the spheres,” your first thought probably wasn’t about mathematics. But in its historical origin, the music of the spheres actually was all about math. In ...