What's seven times nine? Quick, you've got six seconds to answer. This June, over 600,000 children in England in year four, aged eight and nine, will be expected to answer questions like this. They ...

Anita Ponsaing receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical & Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS). Most people will probably remember the times tables from primary school quizzes.

From a few fragments out of a collection of 23-century-old bamboo strips, historians have pieced together what they say is the world's oldest example of a multiplication table in base 10. Five years ...