All mainstream credit card numbers obey a mathematical trick designed to catch the most common typos. It’s called the Luhn algorithm, named after IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn, who patented it in ...

You’re at the checkout screen after an online shopping spree, ready to enter your credit card number. You type it in and instantly see a red error message ...

Mathematicians love the certainty of proofs. This is how they verify that their intuition matches observable truth. This logical love of proofs is uniquely suited to opening up the black box of ...

When it comes to teaching math, a debate has persisted for decades: How, and to what degree, should algorithms be a focus of learning math? The step-by-step procedures are among the most debated ...

Among high school students and adults, girls and women are much more likely to use traditional, step-by-step algorithms to ...