Though generations of schoolchildren have cursed arithmetic, the world was a much more inconvenient place without it. Before the advent of modern arithmetic in the 13th century, basic calculations ...

To carry out their calculations, merchants in the early 13th century used an abacus or a system called finger reckoning. Commerce changed when Leonardo of Pisa — known today as Fibonacci — published ...

A year after he started his Ph.D. in mathematics at McGill University, Matt Bowen had a problem. “I took my qualifying exams and did absolutely horribly on them,” he said. Bowen was sure that his ...

AN excellent way to see one’s own country, or one’s own century, is to visit another. While I was making just such a mental pilgrimage to the eighth century, a recent interest in unconventional ...

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 ...

"Numbers are a human invention, and they’re not something we get automatically from nature," says Caleb Everett. Kwangmoozaa/iStock Once you learn numbers, it’s hard to unwrap your brain from their ...

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. During the 1950s, the Belgian teacher ...