Everyone knows that arithmetic is true: 2 + 2 = 4. But surprisingly, we don’t know why it’s true. By stepping outside the box of our usual way of thinking about numbers, my colleagues and I have ...

Everyone knows that 2 + 2 = 4, but why do we have arithmetic in the first place, and why is it true? Researchers at the University of Canterbury have recently answered these questions by "reverse ...

IF YOU were forced to learn long division at school, you might have had cause to curse whoever invented arithmetic. A wearisome whirl of divisors and dividends, of bringing the next digit down and ...