Math is hard. For many students, keeping up with a classroom that moves too fast — or too slow — is exhausting. Traditional ...

Frank Merle is used to confronting a messy world. A linear equation is something like y = 2x, which states that the value of ...

For Sarthak Dassarma ’26, mathematics isn’t a set of rules to memorize—it’s a story, and the Putnam Competition is just his ...

Teachers can use these questions to draw students out and get worthwhile formative assessment responses to guide instruction.

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. In 1997, Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by IBM, did the unexpected: it defeated chess ...

You’re never too old to learn something new. People are losing their minds over how simple — yet tricky — an elementary school-level math equation posted on X (formerly Twitter) is. Over the weekend, ...

In March 2025, mathematician Daniel Litt made a bet. Despite the march of progress of artificial intelligence in many fields, he believed his subject was safe, wagering with a colleague that there was ...

Some readers may solve the problem procedurally: line up the two numbers, add the ones column, carry the one, and add the tens to get 43. Others might instead notice a creative shortcut: 29 + 14 is ...

GPT just keeps getting better at mathematics, increasingly solving the trickiest of problems. In January, AI testing company Epoch AI found that a previous version of the AI model, GPT-5.2 Pro had ...

Some kids struggle with math. Now, scientists have pinpointed some of the specific thinking processes and brain regions that might explain why math is a little harder for some than others. When given ...

Over the past couple of months, several researchers have begun making the same provocative claim: They used generative-AI tools to solve a previously unanswered math problem. The most extreme promises ...