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 ...

Determining the relative abundance of two different molecular species or the absolute number of molecules in a single sample is challenging. We describe an absolute counting method that can use ...

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 ...

Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of zero. It’s only the latest evidence of animals’ talents for numerical abstraction — which may still differ from our own grasp of numbers.

Parents typically start teaching their children to count at an early age: one fish two fish, three little pigs, five little monkeys, and so on. Research has shown that kids don’t fully understand 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 ...

Your child is learning new things every day. And just as you can help them with their language and reading, there are also ways you can boost your preschooler’s number skills. This is especially ...