On a set of broken clay bowls from northern Mesopotamia, delicate flower patterns have turned out to be something far more radical than decoration. New analysis of this ancient art suggests that early ...

Long before anyone wrote down a number, early villagers were painting flowers with a precision that looks suspiciously like ...

There's a part of the brain that enables us to perceive magnitude -- we can compare loudness when hearing different tones or compare the number of dots in a group at a glance. Neuroscientists have ...

On the road to algebra, children must learn a weird idea: that numbers can be smaller than zero (negative) and can be mixed with numbers greater than zero (positive) in an equation. Now researchers at ...

Mathematician Katie Steckles explains just why the proliferation of snowflake decorations this time of year is deeply ...

The 2008 Abel Prize was awarded to John Griggs Thompson of the University of Florida and Jacques Tits of the Collège de France for their contributions to group theory, the mathematical field that ...