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 ...

Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this book, to buy it in print, or to download it as a free PDF. §14.2 Algebraic Topology. Topology is generally introduced as I described it in §AG.6, ...

Wei Ho, the first director of the Women and Mathematics program at the Institute for Advanced Study, combines algebra and geometry in her work on an ancient class of curves. Like many people who would ...

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 ...

In his book The Mathematical Universe, mathematician William Dunham wrote of John Venn’s namesake legacy, the Venn diagram, “No one in the long history of mathematics ever became better known for less ...

In 2014 Mura Yakerson, a college student at the time, decided to practice driving in a quiet area in the countryside near Saint Petersburg, Russia. Then something went wrong. While she was pulling out ...

§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 ...