The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. David Bessis was drawn to mathematics for the same reason that many people are driven away: He didn’t understand how it worked. Unlike ...

Every mathematician has a story that goes something like this. You’re at a party, and someone asks what you do for a living. “I’m a mathematician,” you say. “You must be a genius!” they reply. Or ...

Humans are born to do math, and they have the brain infrastructure to prove it—including a cluster of specialized nerve cells for processing numbers. Despite this dedicated cluster, mathematical ...

In a post-Covid world, we can no longer assume that a student’s age and mathematical experiences line up in previously expected ways. Indeed, they may not even be close. It’s a tension that’s always ...

In “The Great Math War,” Jason Socrates Bardi takes on a battle for the soul of numbers that divided the experts of its day. By Jordan Ellenberg Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at the ...