AI could soon spew out hundreds of mathematical proofs that look "right" but contain hidden flaws, or proofs so complex we ...

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 ...

This is an updated version of a story first published on May 5, 2024. For many high school students returning to class, it may seem like geometry and trigonometry were created by the Greeks as a form ...

Consider the numbers used - Even Numbers and Primes. Both groups have a common property - Digital Roots All Digital Roots have a common property - an infinite loop ...

Using “refreshingly old” tools, mathematicians resolved a 50-year-old conjecture about how to categorize important functions called modular forms, with consequences for number theory and theoretical ...

A few months before the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in July, a three-person team at OpenAI made a long bet that they could use the competition’s brutally tough problems to train an ...

Michael Freedman’s momentous 1981 proof of the four-dimensional Poincaré conjecture was on the verge of being lost. The editors of a new book are trying to save it. One of the most important pieces of ...

It’s the largest math proof. A supercomputer solved it in just 2 days. And it’s 200 terabytes. Yes, 200 terabytes. That’s the size of the file containing the computer-assisted proof for a mathematical ...

When I tell someone I am a mathematician, one of the most curious common reactions is: “I really liked math class because everything was either right or wrong. There is no ambiguity or doubt.” I ...