Students often struggle to connect math with the real world. Word problems—a combination of words, numbers, and mathematical operations—can be a perfect vehicle to take abstract numbers off the page.

Mathematicians used “magic functions” to prove that two highly symmetric lattices solve a myriad of problems in eight- and 24-dimensional space. The points could be an infinite collection of electrons ...

Math is generally a required subject for students in the United States until college. You might elect not to take further math classes because of a lack of aptitude—I’m not a math person. But this is ...