"You know the classic joke about the extrovert mathematician? He's the one that looks at your shoelaces when he's talking to you," says Dr Bill Palmer, who is well aware of the pressures that the young maths whiz can face.

A little known school of scholars in southwest India discovered one of the founding principles of modern mathematics hundreds of years before Newton – according to new research.

Cryptography is just about as old as written communication itself, and mathematics has long supplied methods for the cryptographic toolbox. Starting in the 1970s, increasingly sophisticated mathematics began to make inroads into cryptography, changing the nature of the field and bringing new perspectives on what it means to keep communications secure.

Students' performance on annual math and science assessments improved in almost every age group when their schools were involved in a program that partners K-12 teachers with their colleagues in higher education.

Scientists say they have cracked a nearly eight-decade-old riddle involving the Moebius strip, a mathematical phenomenon that has also become an icon of art.

Can kids finally get the answer to the perennial question: What do we need to study math for" The latest development of Prof. Michal Yerushalmy, of the Institute for Alternatives in Education of the Faculty of Education at the University of Haifa, may indeed have the answer to this question, through a medium that today's youth understand very well –their cellular telephones.

A popular stereotype that boys are better at mathematics than girls undermines girls' math performance because it causes worrying that erodes the mental resources needed for problem solving, new research at the University of Chicago shows.

Mathematicians have mapped the inner workings of one of the most complicated structures ever studied: the object known as the exceptional Lie group E8. This achievement is significant both as an advance in basic knowledge and because of the many connections between E8 and other areas, including string theory and geometry.