So significant was its impact on the discipline that a Japanese TV crew travelled to Stanford to interview academics about the chalk. Satyan Devadoss, a professor at mathematics at Williams ...

Artists have paintbrushes and canvas, carpenters have hammers and wood; for mathematicians, the tools of the trade have long been a blackboard and a slender cylinder of chalk (preferably Hagoromo, the ...

Hagoromo Stationery first began manufacturing chalk in Japan back in 1932 ... writing with chalk.” The blackboard tradition seems to be beloved among math professors. Bayer describes it ...

On a recent evening, students were taking a math class in front of a new electronic blackboard in one classroom. In another classroom, other students were taking a Japanese language class.

Afterward, a teacher paused the video and asked a girl to write the phrase they had sung on the blackboard ... language.

Last month, a national cry of alarm greeted the announcement by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that in a survey of math skills, Japan had fallen from first place in 2000 ...