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 ...

Several species of animal can count, but only humans can do so using abstract number symbols like ‘2’ or ‘4’. Now we know we do so using a different set of brain cells from those we use to recognise ...

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 ...