A game of chess requires its players to think several moves ahead, a skill that computer programs have mastered over the years. Back in 1996, an IBM supercomputer famously beat the then world chess ...

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 ...

We've wondered for centuries whether knowledge is latent and innate or learned and grasped through experience, and a new research project is asking the same question about AI. When you purchase ...

And it all began with a hobbyist “messing about and experimenting with shapes.” An “aperiodic monotile,” or einstein, is a shape that tiles an infinite flat surface in a nonrepeating pattern. The ...

This story originally appeared in the February 2025 issue of Texas Monthly as part of our public-education feature, “What Our Schools Actually Need.” Humans have been learning math for thousands of ...

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made artificial intelligence more adaptable than ever before, but that comes with a drawback: lies. Generative AI tends to make things up, but ...

A dad in Texas turned to social media for help after becoming increasingly confused by a third-grade math problem set for his child as homework. Marty posted a screenshot of the problem to Reddit ...

A key part—though surely not the only part—of early-grades math is ensuring students get the basic arithmetic functions down and, beyond that, making sure they’re able to swiftly and automatically ...

The California Mathematics Framework (C.M.F.) is an arguably obscure but extremely consequential document informing the educations of millions of children, from transitional kindergarten to twelfth ...

What if the next new mathematical discovery didn’t come from a human mind, but from an AI? Imagine a machine not just crunching numbers but proposing original solutions to problems that have baffled ...

Early literacy often dominates conversations around foundational learning in today’s educational system. However, despite the emphasis on STEM in later years, the importance of early numeracy in ...

I’ve been out of school a long time (I mean a long time), yet I think I’m still pretty good at basic math. I’m always able to figure out whether a “bargain buy” at the supermarket is actually a ...