The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Much of mathematics is driven by intuition, by a deep-rooted sense of what should be true. But sometimes instinct can lead a ...

Much of mathematics is driven by intuition, by a deep-rooted sense of what should be true. But sometimes instinct can lead a mathematician astray. Early evidence might not represent the bigger picture ...

Consider a pencil lying on your desk. Try to spin it around so that it points once in every direction, but make sure it sweeps over as little of the desk’s surface as possible. You might twirl the ...

Summer Haag and Clyde Kertzer made major news in the math world while working on a summer research project Prior to the end of the 2022-2023 academic year, graduate student Summer Haag and junior ...

Has one of the major outstanding problems in number theory finally been solved? Or is the 600-page proof missing a key piece? The verdict isn’t in yet, but the proof, at least, will finally appear in ...

The last dimension of Keller's conjecture has been proven using a computer algorithm. The conjecture involves the way hypercubes in different dimensions share sides when tiled. The proof is ...

At first glance, the problem seems ridiculously simple. And yet experts have been searching for a solution in vain for decades. According to mathematician Jeffrey Lagarias, number theorist Shizuo ...

A pair of mathematicians has solved the first chunk of one of the most famous conjectures about the additive properties of whole numbers. Proposed more than 60 years ago by the legendary Hungarian ...