The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime ...

Little kids are looking at a lot of dots these days. The theory behind this increasingly popular practice is that an effective way to teach counting might be by … not counting. That’s the ...

Imagine a horizontal line. The very left is marked one thousand and the very right is marked one billion. On this line, where would you add a marker to represent one million? If you said somewhere in ...

Infants and animals are able to understand approximate quantities of different types, in terms of relative proportions of the numbers of different sets of objects, provided the difference in numbers ...