All mainstream credit card numbers obey a mathematical trick designed to catch the most common typos. It’s called the Luhn algorithm, named after IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn, who patented it in ...

What do encrypted messages, recognizing speech commands and running simulations to predict the weather have in common? They all rely on matrix multiplication for accurate calculations. DeepMind, an ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in ...

Among high school students and adults, girls and women are much more likely to use traditional, step-by-step algorithms to ...

This summer, battle lines were drawn over a simple math problem: 8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = ? If you divide 8 by 2 first, you get 16, but if you multiply 2 by (2 + 2) first, you get 1. So, which answer is right?