On a rainy day in Detroit, a Ford engineer got confused, then soaked—and inspired. It took decades before he got any credit.

Unlike many other countries, Bangladesh largely views the crop as just another vegetable eaten with rice, not as a basic industrial raw material.

Can you solve the elementary school problem that divided the internet in less than 30 seconds? Test your might in this ...

New research reveals why even state-of-the-art large language models stumble on seemingly easy tasks—and what it takes to fix ...

Life gets busy, and sometimes those basic math skills from school days get a little rusty. Whether you're budgeting, measuring for a DIY project, or just having a math-related brain teaser thrown your ...

The New York State Education Department is pushing new math guidelines, including a recommendation that teachers stop giving timed quizzes — because it stresses students out. The new guidelines also ...

It is just as natural for young children to think mathematically about their world as it is for them to use language. They develop mathematical knowledge as they manipulate objects and reason about ...

We’d all like to be innovative, but few people have creativity switches they can turn on at will. (I definitely don’t.) We’re a lot better at convergent thinking, using knowledge and experience to ...

The idea of an animal that can count or do math might sound like something out of a viral news story or TikTok video. But a sense of quantity, sometimes called "numerosity," appears across a ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The simplest ideas in mathematics can also be the most perplexing. Take addition. It’s a straightforward operation: One of the first ...

In May 2025, a claim (archived) circulated online that the tech entrepreneur and former Trump adviser Elon Musk solved an "unsolvable" math problem after a Harvard professor called him "rich but dumb.

Problem-solving is becoming more and more seen as an important skill for college students to learn to build metacognitive skills, critical thought, and the ability to learn on their own. Even though ...