Jack Murtagh is a freelance math writer and puzzle creator. He writes a column on mathematical curiosities for Scientific ...

Holidays bring celebration, rest and, for many families, long stretches of indoor time. For some, this means tabletop games quickly reappear on kitchen tables. Games provide opportunities for learning ...

Some of the most satisfying number puzzles require little mathematical know-how. In fact, cracking the one below calls for thinking that is quite nonmathematical. I don’t know where or when I first ...

Teaching math to English learners in middle and high school requires a nuanced approach. Those students are often at very different places in their language development and in their academic grounding ...

You are participating in a holiday gift exchange with a few classmates. You each write down your own name on a slip of paper and fold it up. Then all the students place their names into a single hat.

In honor of April Fools’ Day, I offer the puzzling case of the Lesser Fool. In a fictional town, there lived an odd wanderer. People would present him with two amounts of money or goods and ask which ...