trigonometry

(Newser) - Charles Barkley was as impressed as anybody that two high school seniors in Louisiana became the second and third people in the 2,000-year history of the Pythagorean theorem to solve it using trigonometry. So after seeing their story on CBS' 60 Minutes in May, the basketball great promised to...

(Newser) - Greek astronomer Hipparchus is known as the father of trigonometry. But the Guardian reports Babylonian mathematicians may have gotten there 1,000 years earlier. Ever since the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones discovered a 3,700-year-old clay tablet called P322 in what is now Iraq, historians and mathematicians have debated...

(Newser) - The skill of estimating group size at a glance is directly linked to success in higher forms of math like algebra and calculus, reports the Washington Post. A new study found that students with better “number sense”—the ability to quickly and accurately guess numbers in a group—...