Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this book, to buy it in print, or to download it as a free PDF. For many people, free association with the word “mathematics” would produce strong, ...

How is math education different now from, say, in President Abraham Lincoln’s day? A new online exhibition sheds light on math’s long history. The exhibition is a collaboration between the National ...

Fifty years ago, “fractal” was born. In a 1975 book, the Polish-French-American mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot coined the term to describe a family of rough, fragmented shapes that fall outside ...

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 ...

How does a revolution start? Sometimes, it’s a simple question. For Sarah Powell, an associate professor of special education at the University of Texas at Austin, the question was this math problem: ...

Almost 400 years ago, in The Assayer, Galileo wrote: “Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe … [But the book] is written in the language of mathematics.” He was much more than an ...

Sara Rezvi (@arsinoepi on twitter) is a former high school mathematics teacher, a current doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the College of Education, and the program ...

After 15 years of inquiry into children’s understanding and learning of whole numbers, I can sum up what I have learned very simply. To teach math, you need to know three things. You need to know ...