International Maths Challenge

  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 will be sitting the multiplication tables check (MTC), a statutory assessment of their multiplication fact recall. The MTC was introduced in 2022 with the aim of driving up standards in mathematics. It’s an online test that children take on a tablet or computer, made up of 25 questions with six seconds per question. Being able to quickly recall multiplication facts is valuable. Not having to think about seven times nine, just knowing that it’s 63, frees up a child’s mental thinking space. This means they can focus on different aspects of the mathematics they are doing, such as completing multi-step problems or using reasoning to solve context-based problems. Being able to quickly recall multiplication facts is also the foundation for more advanced mathematics topics that children will ...

  As the artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing industries explode, trained STEM professionals are in high demand. Mathematics is foundational to these fields. But mathematics is missing an important ingredient: people who are female or gender-diverse. In New South Wales, for example, only one-third of high school graduates who complete mathematics at the highest level are female or gender-diverse. And when students choose university courses in December, a large proportion of these highly qualified people will step away from mathematics and STEM. Australia cannot stay competitive by only accessing half of its young talent. By leaving mathematics early, young women and gender-diverse people limit their own career opportunities. Worse, the new technologies resulting from the current revolutions may not serve broader society well, if women and gender-diverse people are not involved in their development. But at the University of Sydney over the past five years we have run a...

      Math teachers have to accommodate high school students’ different approaches to problem-solving. RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images Among high school students and adults, girls and women are much more likely to use traditional, step-by-step algorithms to solve basic math problems – such as lining up numbers to add, starting with the ones place, and “carrying over” a number when needed. Boys and men are more likely to use alternative shortcuts, such as rounding both numbers, adding the rounded figures, and then adjusting to remove the rounding. But those who use traditional methods on basic problems are less likely to solve more complex math problems correctly. These are the main findings of two studies our research team published in November 2025. This new evidence may help explain an apparent contradiction in the existing research – girls do better at math in school, but boys do better on high-stakes math tests and are more lik...

    Milad Fakurian / Unsplash OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman – perhaps the most prominent face of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom that accelerated with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 – loves scaling laws. These widely admired rules of thumb linking the size of an AI model with its capabilities inform much of the headlong rush among the AI industry to buy up powerful computer chips, build unimaginably large data centres, and re-open shuttered nuclear plants. As Altman argued in a blog post earlier this year, the thinking is that the “intelligence” of an AI model “roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it” – meaning you can steadily produce better performance by exponentially increasing the scale of data and computing power involved. First observed in 2020 and further refined in 2022, the scaling laws for large language models (LLMs) come from drawing lines on charts of experimental data. For engineers, they give a simple formula that...

  If you ask a small child a simple maths question, such as 4+2, they may count on their fingers to work it out. Should we encourage young children to do this? This seemingly simple question is surprisingly complex to answer. Some teachers and parents might say, yes, it seems to help young children learn about numbers. Others might discourage finger counting, arguing it might slow the development of mental strategies. A new Swiss study, released on Friday, shows kids who use finger counting from a young age perform better at addition than those who do not. What does the research say? There is a rich debate among researchers about the value of kids using their fingers to count. Education psychologists say finger counting helps children think through strategies without overloading their working memory (how our brains hold pieces of information for short time while we work something out), until more abstract strategies are mastered. Researchers in embodied cognition (lea...

  Most of us have little trouble working out how many millilitres are in 2.4 litres of water (it’s 2,400). But the same can’t be said when we’re asked how many minutes are in 2.4 hours (it’s 144). That’s because the Indo-Arabic numerals we often use to represent numbers are base-10, while the system we often use to measure time is base-60. Expressing time in decimal notation leads to an interaction between these two bases, which can have implications at both the cognitive and cultural level. Such base interactions and their consequences are among the important topics covered in a new issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society journal, which I co-edited with colleagues Andrea Bender (University of Bergen), Mary Walworth (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and Simon J. Greenhill (University of Auckland). The themed issue brings together work from anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and psychology to examine how humans conceptualize numbers and...

  If the recent news of a new mathematics and statistics curriculum for years 0–10 felt familiar, that’s because it was. In term four last year, the Ministry of Education released a previous new maths (and English) curriculum for Years 0–8, to be implemented from term one this year. Schools must use the latest new curriculum from term one next year. This will be the third curriculum for primary and intermediate schools in less than three years. Despite claims that the most recent curriculum is only an “update”, the changes are bigger than teachers might have expected. The new curriculum is more difficult and more full. There is now a longer list of maths procedures and vocabulary to be memorised at each year of school. For example, year 3 children should learn there are 366 days in a leap year and that leap years happen every four years. Year 5 students should know what acute, obtuse and reflex angles are. Some concepts have been moved into earlier years. Year 6 childre...

  Mathematics has been the broccoli of school subjects for generations of Australian teenagers. Often pushed aside, dreaded, or even feared, nearly one third of students opt out of any senior maths courses. This has serious implications for Australia’s future. As an Australian Academy of Science report warned on Thursday, we need people with maths skills to support a whole range of careers in science. This includes agricultural science, artificial intelligence, data science, biotechnology and climate science. The skills we gain during school mathematics – problem-solving, pattern-finding, reasoning logically, and computational thinking – are essential to the work of many STEM careers. The challenge is turning maths from broccoli to the ingredient every student wants on their plate for their future. So, what can we do? What has been happening with high school maths? Across Australia, there has been a decline in students studying maths in years 11 and 12 since the 1990s. ...