Barbie caught a lot of flack back in the ’90s for declaring, “Math class is tough!” Today we find ourselves in the disorienting position of defending her. We recently got a note from an anonymous ...

Consider this sequence of numbers: 5, 7, 9. Can you spot the pattern? Here’s another with the same pattern: 15, 19, 23. One more: 232, 235, 238. “Three equally spaced things,” says Raghu Meka, a ...

Young children can crudely add and subtract numbers before they have learned the rules of arithmetic, a new study finds. Researchers presented five- and six-year-old children with problems such as, ...

When I was a kid learning arithmetic the only visual aid I remember is flash cards. These were useful for memorizing single-digit addition and multiplication, but is memorization really the best ...

Sanjiv is a journalist working for the Edit Page of The Times of India. Manil Suri is a mathematics professor at University of Maryland and a novelist. He spoke to Sanjiv Shankaran about his latest ...