Beginning with simple calculations, such as the number of sheep in a herd, the field of mathematics has developed over time according to people’s needs and interests. In the course of history, ...

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 ...

“HIGHER Mathematics,” edited by Mansfield Merriman and Robert S. Woodward, is a text-book for classical and engineering colleges, and is a work containing 600 pages. Each chapter is written by a ...

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 ...

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 ...

THIS is the second volume of the three in which ooo the authors are writing the history of Hindu mathematics. The first contained Part 1, dealing with numeral notation and arithmetic, which was issued ...

A tablet that dates back some 3700 years has been found to be the oldest example of applied geometry in the history of mathematics. Australian mathematician Dr. Daniel Mansfield from UNSW Science's ...

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 ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Whenever an impressive new technology comes ...