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 ...

Everyone knows that 2 + 2 = 4, but why do we have arithmetic in the first place, and why is it true? Researchers at the University of Canterbury have recently answered these questions by "reverse ...

Researchers set out to test whether bees could do math, building on a groundbreaking finding that bees understand the concept of zero. The new study shows bees can be taught to recognize colors as ...

Consider this sequence of numbers: 5, 7, 9. Can you spot the pattern? Here’s another with the same pattern: 15, 19, 23. One more: 232, 235, 238. “Three equally spaced things,” says Raghu Meka, a ...

Before the 13th century Europeans used Roman numerals to do arithmetic. Leonardo of Pisa, better known today as Fibonacci, is largely responsible for the adoption of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system in ...

The above experiments were conducted in a quiet laboratory setting and focused on children living in a relatively wealthy and highly educated community. To investigate their generality, we used the ...