Students often struggle to connect math with the real world. Word problems—a combination of words, numbers, and mathematical operations—can be a perfect vehicle to take abstract numbers off the page.

You can probably think of a time when you’ve used math to solve an everyday problem, such as calculating a tip at a restaurant or determining the square footage of a room. But what role does math play ...

Two mathematicians have used a new geometric approach in order to address a very old problem in algebra. In school, we often learn how to multiply out and factor polynomial equations like (x² – 1) or ...

One of the biggest barriers for secondary English learners in math is not computation, but language. The subject’s complex ...

Among high school students and adults, girls and women are much more likely to use traditional, step-by-step algorithms to solve basic math problems – such as lining up numbers to add, starting with ...

A ripple tells you something happened, but not exactly what. That is the core problem behind a hard class of equations that ...

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. In 1997, Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by IBM, did the unexpected: it defeated chess ...