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 ...

Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this book, to buy it in print, or to download it as a free PDF. §I.1 THIS BOOK IS A HISTORY OF ALGEBRA, written for the curious nonmathematician. It ...

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 ...

A 9th-century Persian scholar, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, revolutionized mathematics by introducing systematic methods ...

University of Florida provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US. I discovered recently that my calculus students do not know the meaning of the word “quorum.” Since a course in ...

In 2014 Mura Yakerson, a college student at the time, decided to practice driving in a quiet area in the countryside near Saint Petersburg, Russia. Then something went wrong. While she was pulling out ...

Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this book, to buy it in print, or to download it as a free PDF. §14.2 Algebraic Topology. Topology is generally introduced as I described it in §AG.6, ...