Some 60,000 years ago, in what is now western France, a Neanderthal picked up a chunk of hyena femur and a stone tool and began to work. When the task was complete, the bone bore nine notches that ...

Most people learn to count and do basic arithmetic at a young age and don’t give these skills a second thought. But numerosity or numeracy, the ability to think about and use numbers, is more than a ...

The history of math is murky, predating any written records. When did humans first grasp the basic concept of a number? What about size and magnitude, or form and shape? In my math history courses and ...

When she was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Jinjing Jenny Wang kept wondering: How do children learn to count? It’s so basic, “but when you think about the problem, it is really ...

Little kids are looking at a lot of dots these days. The theory behind this increasingly popular practice is that an effective way to teach counting might be by … not counting. That’s the ...

Believe it or not, counting is not special. Quite a few animals have figured it out over the years. Tiny honeybees compare what is less and what is more, and their brains are smaller than a pinky nail ...