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Zip. Zilch. Nada. There's no real difference between the scores of U.S. boys and girls on common math tests, according to a massive new study. Educators hope the finding will finally dispel lingering perceptions that girls don't measure up to boys when it comes to crunching numbers. "This shows there's no issue of intellectual ability--and that's a message we still need to get out to some of our parents and teachers," says Henry "Hank" Kepner, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in Reston, Virginia. It won't be a new message. Nearly 20 years ago, a large-scale study...

My wife and I have 3 children (ages 1, 3, and 5), and we recently purchased a home in Winchester, Massachusetts, because its schools have a good reputation and its students do well on the MCAS . I looked at the "Academics" section of the school district web site and found "Math literature lists" (what happened to textbooks?) for various grades. The 4th grade list at http://mail.winchester.k12.ma.us/~mkerble/mathlists4.doc lists dozens of books, including Count your Way Through Africa Count Your Way Through Arab World and 7 move "Count your Way" books Amazon says the "Count your Way Through Africa" book "uses...

New Push To Prevent Gas Gouging At Illinois PumpsReporting Dorothy Tucker Jul 3, 2008 6:27 pm US/Central CHICAGO (CBS) With the price of gas well over $4 a gallon, consumers want every drop they pay for. But sometimes Pamela Smith wondered if the gas was flowing when she was pumping. "While I'm pumping the nozzle is clicking and it's going on and off and I'm not certain if the gas is going into the vehicle," Smith said. She is among the hundreds who have registered their concerns with the state. The state has had 700 complaints since January, compared to...

Reading and math scores for New York students in grades three through eight showed extraordinary gains across the state since last year, with particularly striking leaps in the large urban areas, including New York City. The gains were apparent for nearly every grade tested in both subjects, in some cases with double-digit increases in the percentage of students performing at grade level or above, according to the scores on the annual statewide exams released by education officials on Monday. The improvements were so substantial that several education experts expressed skepticism, noting that large gains were posted even by cities like...

Bo (woof) In Commentary: Some think this dog is amazing. Me, I’m not surprised. (In case you missed this one, a Mission Viejo woman’s dog — a 9-year-old cockapoo known as Cookie Einstein — has become a celebrity of sorts for her apparent mathematical abilities, the O.C. Register’s Niyaz Pirani reported over the weekend. She [Cookie] adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides and calculates square roots and simple algebra through barking. And Cookie can answer if the question’s asked in either English or Spanish.) Bi-lingual and good in math…she must have scored well on her SATs. Cookie won’t respond to anybody but...

Einstein rings produced by a galaxy behind the lensing galaxy. The sources are actually extended and that is why one sometimes sees arcs rather than complete rings. Credit: Photo credit: NASA, ESA, and the SLACS Survey team: A. Bolton (Harvard/Smithsonian), S. Burles (MIT), L. Koopmans (Kapteyn), T. Treu (UCSB), and L. Moustakas (JPL/Caltech) The mathematicians were trying to extend an illustrious result in their field, the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra. The astrophysicists were working on a fundamental problem in their field, the problem of gravitational lensing. That the two groups were in fact working on the same question is...

The prestigious Lockheed Martin MATHCOUNTS National Competition took place yesterday. You don't get there by learning Everyday Math crap. It's the real deal. The winner of the individual contest was an 11-year-old 6th-grader from Bellevue, Washington, Darryl Wu. Here was the winning question. Can you solve it? And, oh, by the way, the question was timed. Darryl came up with the answer in less than 45 seconds.

Aztec Math Decoded, Reveals Woes of Ancient Tax Time Brian Handwerk for National Geographic NewsApril 3, 2008 Today's tax codes are complicated, but the ancient Aztecs likely shared your pain. To measure tracts of taxable land, Aztec mathematicians had to develop their own specialized arithmetic, which has only now been decoded. By reading Aztec records from the city-state of Tepetlaoztoc, a pair of scientists recently figured out the complicated equations and fractions that officials once used to determine the size of land on which tributes were paid. Two ancient codices, written from A.D. 1540 to 1544, survive from Tepetlaoztoc. They...

Take a minute to think about the following: When was the last time you made a mathematical calculation in your head or by hand (yes which means not using a calculator)? Surely, some of you avoid math like the plague – especially when your teenage child comes around looking for help on their math homework – but you must admit that even in this compalculator era it comes in handy to be able to tally your bills in your head or figure out the miles per gallon you’re getting while driving along in traffic. Surely it seems reasonable to expect...

A mathematical mystery that has baffled top minds in the field of symbolic dynamics for nearly four decades was cracked last year by a 63-year-old former Israeli security guard. Avraham Trakhtman, a mathematician who worked as a laborer after immigrating to Israel from Russia, succeeded in solving the elusive Road Coloring Problem. The conjecture assumes that it is possible to create a universal map that would direct people to arrive at a certain destination, at the same time, regardless of their original location. Experts say this proposition, which seems to defy logic, could actually have real-life applications in the fields...

JERUSALEM - A mathematical puzzle that baffled the top minds in the esoteric field of symbolic dynamics for nearly four decades has been cracked — by a 63-year-old immigrant who once had to work as a security guard. Avraham Trahtman, a mathematician who also toiled as a laborer after moving to Israel from Russia, succeeded where dozens failed, solving the elusive "Road Coloring Problem." The conjecture essentially assumed it's possible to create a "universal map" that can direct people to arrive at a certain destination, at the same time, regardless of starting point. Experts say the proposition could have real-life...

My daughter, Anna, shared this with me this today. I thought I'd share it with my FRiends. Pi, Pi, Mathematical PI

A presidential panel declared math education in the United States "broken" yesterday and called on schools to focus on ensuring that children master fundamental skills that provide the underpinnings for success in higher math and, ultimately, in high-tech jobs.... ...Scores from the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment showed 15-year-olds in the United States trailed peers from 23 industrialized countries in math. The panel stressed that many students are simply befuddled by fractions.... ....In a culture in which parents say they "weren't good at math either," children assume they don't have the talent for numbers. The panel said that research...

With both Hillary and Obama promising billions in freebies, who’s going to pay after they kill the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs? Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten is $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing. The fifth would pay $1. The sixth would pay $3. The seventh would pay $7. The eighth would pay $12. The ninth would pay $18. The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.So, that’s...

Which math-phobic among us has not beseeched God for help with another colon-clenching algebra or calculus exam? Had we heeded the words of the German mathematician Leopold Kronecker, perhaps we would have realized we've been talking to the wrong person: "God made the integers; all else is the work of man." Pythagoras, who gave us his eponymous theorem on right-angled triangles, headed a cult of number worshippers who believed God was a mathematician. "All is number," they would intone. The 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza echoed the Platonic idea that mathematical law and the harmony of nature are aspects of...

The mosques of the medieval Islamic world are artistic wonders and perhaps mathematical wonders as well. A study of patterns in 12th- to 17th-century mosaics suggests that Muslim scholars made a geometric breakthrough 500 years before mathematicians in the West. Peter J. Lu, a physics graduate student at Harvard University, noticed a striking similarity between certain medieval mosque mosaics and a geometric pattern known as a quasi crystal—an infinite tiling pattern that doesn’t regularly repeat itself and has symmetries not found in normal crystals (see video below). Lu teamed up with physicist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University to test the...

There was an old, and sadly funny joke about the Evolution of Math Quizzes that went like this: 1960s A logger cuts and sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is four-fifths of that amount. What is his profit? 1970s New-math A logger exchanges a set (L) of lumber for a set (M) of money. The cardinality of Set M is 100. The set C of production costs contains 20 fewer points. What is the cardinality of Set P of profits? 1980s A logger cuts and sells a truckload of lumber for $100. Her cost is...

An international team of mathematicians announced in May that they had factored a 307-digit number—a record for the largest factored number and a feat that suggests Internet security may be on its last legs. “Things are becoming less and less secure,” says Arjen Lenstra, a computer scientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) in Switzerland, who organized the effort. Messages in cyberspace are encrypted with a random 1,024-bit number generated by multiplying two large primes together. But if hackers using factorization can break the number into its prime multipliers, they can intercept the message. Factorization currently takes too long to...

I’m sure this is elementary but I need some help with a probability. Two trains leave the station…. nooo, scratch that. Let’s say there are two Track and Field competitions, one is the 500 meter and the other is hurdles. Neither competition is harder than the other, just slightly different. 500 meter competition – The top 4 places from local competition advance to the preliminary competition and meet with 3 other groups of top 4 placers. Those 16 compete and the top 2 make THE BIG TA-DAH! Hurdles competition – Only the 1st place person from the local competition advances...

...Tegethoff used to teach what she called "very boring math," using worksheets of addition and subtraction problems. Now her lessons delve into algebraic thinking. By the third grade, Viers Mill Elementary students are solving equations with letter variables. Long considered a high school staple, introductory algebra is fast becoming a standard course in middle school for college-bound students. That trend is putting new pressure on such schools as Viers Mill to insert the building blocks of algebra into math lessons in the earliest grades. Disappointing U.S. scores on international math tests have added to the urgency of a movement that...