A type of chaos found in everything from prime numbers to turbulence can unify a pair of unrelated ideas, revealing a ...

One of the oldest and simplest problems in geometry has caught mathematicians off guard—and not for the first time. Since antiquity, artists and geometers have wondered how shapes can tile the entire ...

Fermat’s last theorem is just one of many examples of innocent-looking problems that can long stymie even the most astute mathematicians. It took about 350 years to prove Fermat’s scribbled conjecture ...

If pure math can teach us anything, it’s this: occasionally, your special interest might just change the world. For Joshua Zahl and Hong Wang, that special interest was the Kakeya conjecture. “I read ...

A team of mathematicians has solved a math problem first posed more than 40 years ago. It took three mathematicians almost 15 years to solve the famous Rota’s Conjecture – a theory first posed by ...

Hannah Cairo found herself stuck on a problem that wouldn’t leave her mind. It wasn’t a regular homework assignment—it was a decades-old mathematical puzzle believed to be true by leading experts in ...

They made some progress, re-proving the conjecture in two dimensions using different techniques—ones they hoped would be applicable to the three-dimensional case. But then they hit a wall. “At some ...