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 ...
For 50 years, mathematicians have believed that the total number of real numbers is unknowable. A new proof suggests otherwise. In October 2018, David Asperó was on holiday in Italy, gazing out a car ...
A mathematician will turn a groundbreaking 100-page proof into computer code. The proof tool, Lean, lets users turn proofs written in prose into rules and logic for testing. Kevin Buzzard already uses ...
When a legendary mathematician found a mistake in his own work, he embarked on a computer-aided quest to eliminate human error. To succeed, he has to rewrite the ...
Peter Scholze wants to rebuild much of modern mathematics, starting from one of its cornerstones. Now, he has received validation for a proof at the heart of his quest from an unlikely source: a ...
You think writing proofs for algebra during high school was hard? Think again. A trio of brilliant mathematicians just solved a decade-old puzzle and consequently produced the world's largest ...
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 ...
In 1935, Albert Einstein, working with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, grappled with a possibility revealed by the new laws of quantum physics: that two particles could be entangled, or correlated, ...