When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. In October 2024, news broke that Facebook parent company Meta had cracked an "impossible" problem ...

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet focused on education. The Hechinger Report is a national nonprofit newsroom that reports on one topic: education.

Students often struggle to connect math with the real world. Word problems—a combination of words, numbers, and mathematical operations—can be a perfect vehicle to take abstract numbers off the page.

At six, a boy from South Korea makes solving complex math problems such as gamma functions and Euler's functions appear as easy as playing a game of tic-tac-toe. Meanwhile, this writer struggled to ...