Around 1900 B.C., a student in the Sumerian city of Nippur, in what’s now Iraq, copied a multiplication table onto a clay tablet. Some 4,000 years later, that schoolwork survives, as do the student’s ...

Even though "x" is one of the least-used letters in the English alphabet, it appears throughout American culture—from Stan Lee's X-Men superheroes to "The X-Files" TV series. The letter x often ...

Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this book, to buy it in print, or to download it as a free PDF. §I.1 THIS BOOK IS A HISTORY OF ALGEBRA, written for the curious nonmathematician. It ...

Tucked away in a seemingly forgotten corner of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, Daniel Mansfield found what may solve one of ancient math’s biggest questions. First exhumed in 1894 from what is now ...

Would students take a stronger interest in math if they knew that an ancient African bone (from 20,000 B.C.) might be one of the world’s oldest known counting tools? Or that the work of Muslim ...

§CQ.1 THE FIRST GREAT ADVANCE in algebra after the Middle Ages was the general solution of the cubic equation, immediately followed by a solution for the quartic. I tell the full story in the next ...