Everyone knows that arithmetic is true: 2 + 2 = 4. But surprisingly, we don’t know why it’s true. By stepping outside the box of our usual way of thinking about numbers, my colleagues and I have ...

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 ...

IF YOU were forced to learn long division at school, you might have had cause to curse whoever invented arithmetic. A wearisome whirl of divisors and dividends, of bringing the next digit down and ...

Dr. JeFreda R. Brown is a financial consultant, Certified Financial Education Instructor, and researcher who has assisted thousands of clients over a more than two-decade career. She is the CEO of ...

You may never have heard of modular arithmetic, but you use it every day without the slightest difficulty. In this system, numbers wrap around when they reach a certain size called the modulus; it is ...