Every mathematician has a story that goes something like this. You’re at a party, and someone asks what you do for a living. “I’m a mathematician,” you say. “You must be a genius!” they reply. Or ...

David Bessis was drawn to mathematics for the same reason that many people are driven away: He didn’t understand how it worked. Unlike other creative processes, like making music, which can be heard, ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. David Bessis was drawn to mathematics for the same reason that many people are driven away: He didn’t understand how it worked. Unlike ...

Humans are born to do math, and they have the brain infrastructure to prove it—including a cluster of specialized nerve cells for processing numbers. Despite this dedicated cluster, mathematical ...

Math offers us lots of problem-solving techniques that help us distill the essence of questions. Many of us will be familiar with reading a math problem, and needing to figure out what's being asked, ...