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 ...

A red knot is a tiny shorebird that makes an epic 9000-mile journey all the way from the arctic to the tip of southern Chile and back. Biologists and nature enthusiasts congregate at various points ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...