It is well known that teenage boys tend to do better at math than girls, that male high school students are more likely (26) their female counterparts to tackle advanced math courses like calculus, that (27) all the great mathematicians have been men.Are women born with (28) mathematical ability Or does society’s sexism (29) their progress In 1980, two Johns Hopkins University researchers tried to (30) the eternal nature/nurture debate. Julian Stanley andCamillaBenbow have (31) 10,000 talented seventh and eighth (32) between 1972 and 1979. Using the ScholasticAptitude Test, (33) math questions are meant to measure ability rather than knowledge, they discovered (34) sex differences. (35) the verbal abilities of the males and females (36) differed, twice as (37) boys as girls scored over 500 (on a scale of 200 to 800) on mathematical ability; at the 700 level, the ratio was 14 (38) l. The conclusion: males have (39) superior mathematical reasoning ability.Benbow and Stanley’s findings, (40) were published in "Science", (41) some men and women. Now there is comfort for those people in a new study from the University ofChicago that suggests math is not, after all, a natural male (42) Prof. Zalman Usiskin studied 1,366 high school students. They were selected from geometry classes and tested (43) their ability to solve geometry proofs, a subject requiring (44) abstract reasoning and spatial ability. The conclusion (45) by Usiskin: there are no sex differences in math ability.