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.

You can probably think of a time when you’ve used math to solve an everyday problem, such as calculating a tip at a restaurant or determining the square footage of a room. But what role does math play ...

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify how University of Colorado researchers handle their data collection. A student digs into a math problem that references his favorite superhero, ...

A few months before the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in July, a three-person team at OpenAI made a long bet that they could use the competition’s brutally tough problems to train an ...

We’re seeing some new developments in AI models that are shedding light on one of the technology’s most prominent gaps – its relative inability to do math well. Some experts note that AI is ...

The tipping point came in the summer of 2025. That July, several artificial intelligence models solved five out of six problems at the International Mathematical Olympiad, an annual challenge for some ...

Among high school students and adults, girls and women are much more likely to use traditional, step-by-step algorithms to solve basic math problems – such as lining up numbers to add, starting with ...

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. In 1997, Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by IBM, did the unexpected: it defeated chess ...