Barbie caught a lot of flack back in the ’90s for declaring, “Math class is tough!” Today we find ourselves in the disorienting position of defending her. We recently got a note from an anonymous ...

Everyone knows that arithmetic is true: 2 + 2 = 4. But surprisingly, we don't know why it's true. By stepping outside the box of our usual way of thinking about numbers, my colleagues and I have ...

Consider this sequence of numbers: 5, 7, 9. Can you spot the pattern? Here’s another with the same pattern: 15, 19, 23. One more: 232, 235, 238. “Three equally spaced things,” says Raghu Meka, a ...

From classrooms to kitchen tables, debates about math education are never far away. Should teachers drill multiplication facts or encourage creative strategies to solve problems? The answer, ...

A key part—though surely not the only part—of early-grades math is ensuring students get the basic arithmetic functions down and, beyond that, making sure they’re able to swiftly and automatically ...

IF YOU were forced to learn long division at school, you might have had cause to curse whoever invented arithmetic. A wearisome whirl of divisors and dividends, of bringing the next digit down and ...

Regarding arithmetic for junior high school entrance exams, I sometimes hear things like this.'You won't use things like the crane and turtle calculation once you enter junior high school.''Is there a ...

Everyone knows that arithmetic is true: 2 + 2 = 4. But surprisingly, we don’t know why it’s true. By stepping outside the box of our usual way of thinking about numbers, my colleagues and I have ...