Most of us take for granted that we can read, say, the street signs outside of our house. But for an overwhelming number of women in the Arab world, basic literacy is not a given. That’s why in 2009, photographer and TED Fellow Laura Boushnak (TED Talk: For these women, reading is a daring act) began “I Read, I Write,” a series that documents th...

Early this morning TED's Curator, Chris Anderson, appeared on CBS This Morning to talk about the TED Talks phenomenon, as we get close to a major milestone: one billion views. If you weren't awake, or don't have access to American morning television, watch the segment right here >> And watch for some special announcements around ...

TED Conversations is a unique space where any member of this community can get feedback on an idea, ask a question that they just can’t get out of their mind, or start a respectful debate on an issue they hold near and dear to their heart. This week on TED Conversations:  a debate on innovation, questioning the line between Science and State, an...

Watch "The power of x" -- the astonishing, shot-in-one-take opening film for TEDxSummit -- and then see how it was made. This film and photographic experiment set out to prove The Power of X by attempting an Ideas Worth Doing for TEDxSUMMIT. The project fused architecture, dance, math and magic into a bespoke18-meter high triangular mir...

One year ago today, we launched our platform for long-form conversations: TED Conversations. Since that time the TED Conversation community has held 6,435 Conversations, on topics such as: How can computer models help us build intuition? Where do you use math in your profession? Can we ever know how another person "senses" the world?...

Benoit Mandelbrot has died, at 85. We're honored to have had him speak at the first TED, in 1984, and at the most recent TED in Long Beach, where he talked about his life's work: studying fractals and roughness, and helping the world understand how fractal math underpins both nature and art. Mandelbrot was, as TED's curator, Chris Anderson, wrot...

Today is March 14, otherwise known as 3/14. For any math enthusiast, these numbers will certainly set off a bell -- they are the first three digits of Pi. To help you celebrate Pi Day, here are two TED Talks, starting with Daniel Tammet’s “Different ways of knowing.” Tammet has linguistic, numerical and visual synesthesia -- meaning that his per...

In an experimental Session 6, Bill Gates hosted and guest-curated the speaker lineup. David Christian charts our course from the Big Bang to today: "To understand complexity, you have to survey the whole history of the universe. So let's do it." Amina Az-Zubair on the UN Millennium Development Goals in Nigeria: "We are making p...

For this session, we're resurrecting the 17th century custom of the salon in order to delight and educate everyone gathered both here at TED -- and at the simulcasts taking place around the world. In this session: Quixotic, a mixed-media theater/performance/aerialist company. See a sneak peek of their stage work >> Andrew Stan...

From the TED Prize blog: Congratulations to the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) and 2008 TED Prize winner Neil Turok on winning $2 million in funding from Google's Project 10^100. Project 10^100 (10 to the 100th power) was a call for ideas to divide a $10 million fund into five pieces that would help as many people as p...

Moral philosopher Peter Singer starts the last session of TED2013, "A Ripple Effect?" with a shocking video of a 2-year-old girl in China who was hit by a van -- and then a second van -- and ignored by passers-by as she lay dying in an alley. He asks of the audience: Would you have stopped and helped this girl? Not surprisingly, the unanimou...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson The last time we heard from Terry Moore, executive director at the Radius Foundation, he challenged us to reexamine a process that most of us have known how to do nearly as long as we could read: tie our shoes. He returns to the TED stage today to share another valuable tidbit on a character we really have kno...

With more colleges shifting courses to the online classroom and high school teachers and students alike expressing a strong desire to move away from rigid, mandated lesson arcs, it’s clear -- classes don’t have to be exactly as they are. Educators across the globe have begun to look at ways of transforming curriculum to suit different kinds of l...

In this session of TED2015, five speakers explored the bounds of perception — from how babies form expectations to how vision is hardly needed to see. Short recaps of these bold talks ... The logic of the young mind. Scientists have to make generalizations on tiny amounts of data – and so do babies. Laura Schulz investigates the young min...

When he was a child, John Maeda's father came to a parent-teacher meeting and was told that his son was good at math and art. His father nodded. The next day, at his tofu store, his father told a customer that his son was good at ... math. "That's stuck with me all my life," Maeda says. "Why wasn't art okay?" Maeda is here today to talk a...

Communication in 2013 looks so different from what it ever has before. Will technology be the ruin of all that is good and true in language? We don't think so. The speakers in this session explore how the future will bring even greater shifts in how we communicate -- and it may well be for the better. Here, the speakers who appeared in this s...

Who knew equations and graphs could guide your love life? Mathematician Hannah Fry does -- and shares a few formulas for finding The One. When it comes to love, making long-term decisions is a risky business. Sooner or later, most of us decide to leave our carefree bachelor or bachelorette days behind us and settle down. Our wild oats have been...

Arthur Benjamin is perhaps the world's leading mathemagician and, in today's talk, he aims to show the creativity, beauty and wonder that is as much a part of math as logic. Stepping onto the TEDGlobal 2013 stage, Benjamin takes us on a spirited tour of the Fibonacci numbers, where the patterns to be found go far beyond simply adding two con...

Imagine a squid so big that, when sprawled out, it is the size of a two-story house. Edith Widder has now seen this enormous ocean creature, once the stuff of nautical legend, six times. In today’s talk, Widder shares how we now have filmed proof of the giant squid’s existence, thanks to a mission conducted by herself, Tsunemi Kubodera and St...

Here's a thoughtful comment from we received from community member Amy Daniels in response to the late Rita Pierson's TED Talk, Every kid needs a champion: "A wise math teacher (a sage, and one of the reasons I teach the way I teach ... despite having been absolutely rotten at her subject!) once pointed out to us that school has become the only...

8 ways to think about tech in ways that actually improve the classroom. Bringing technology into the classroom often winds up an awkward mash-up between the laws of Murphy and Moore: What can go wrong, will -- only faster. It's a multi-headed challenge: Teachers need to connect with classrooms filled with distinct individuals. We all want ...

Maira Kalman is an artist who effortlessly embodies whimsy and gravitas. Known for her children’s books and New Yorker covers, of late she’s been painting up a storm with beloved children’s author Lemony Snicket, also known as Daniel Handler. In May 2014 the pair published the book Girls Standing on Lawns, a collection of Kalman’s paintings base...

Enjoy these fascinating reads from across the internet: What can the healthcare system learn from chain restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory, Pizza Hut and Red Lobster? Atul Gawande explores. [New Yorker] Watch Atul’s brilliant talk from TED2012, “How do we heal medicine?” . In 2009, American students ranked 23rd in the world in sc...

One might ask Nate Silver, the data whiz behind FiveThirtyEight.com, which shot to prominence after providing eerily accurate forecasts of the 2008 election, what makes for good predictions. His answer will come as a surprise. In his new book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don’t, Silver explains the “prediction ...

(TED is on its annual two-week vacation. During the break, we’re posting playlists from the TEDTalks archive. We’ll be back with new talks Monday!) The wonderful thing about the universe is not just how big it is, but how every time we look into it we find something new and extraordinary. Here are four talks about the vastness of space, a...

By Thu-Huong Ha and Kate Torgovnick The morning session of TEDYouth "The Spark" was incredible. But in many ways it was just an appetizer. In the afternoon, Sessions 2 and 3 delivered talks on topics ranging from how to make an Easy Bake Oven gender-neutral to the mathematics of Pixar animation to the familial structures of elephants. And it ...

It is not nearly enough for students to simply churn out answers from memory. No, in our ever-changing time, they need to be able to think expansively and creatively. In order to solve the complex problems of tomorrow, the traditional academic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic must be replaced with creativity, curiosity, critical thinki...

Massoud Hassani is the creator is the Mine Kafon, a tumbleweed-like apparatus that uses wind gusts to roam through land mine-filled areas and detonate hidden mines as it goes. Born from the designs of the wind-powered toys that Hassani and his brother sent tumbling in the desert outside of Kabul as children, the Mine Kafon almost looks like a...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Superstring theorist and physicist and the co-founder of the World Science Festival, Brian Greene splits his visually rich, action-packed talk into three distinct sections, all in the name of convincing us of the existence of the multiverse, the possibility that way beyond the earth, the milky way, we'll find ...

Much of the recent discussion about inequality has focused on the very rich (the 0.01%) or the very poor (the bottom billion or so). But what about those people who are somewhere in the middle? Through the TED-Ed network, we asked 17 public school teachers working in locations from Kildare to Kathmandu, Johannesburg to Oslo, to tell us wha...