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 ...

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 ...

Mathematicians thought they were on the cusp of proving a conjecture about the ancient structures known as Apollonian circles. But a summer project would lead to its downfall. Summer Haag and Clyde ...

An artificial intelligence has disproved five mathematical conjectures – unproven theorems – despite not being equipped with any information about the problems. Adam Zsolt Wagner at Tel Aviv ...

One of the biggest stories in science is quietly playing out in the world of abstract mathematics. Over the course of last year, researchers fulfilled a decades-old dream when they unveiled a proof of ...

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 ...

As a girl, I too was attracted to Simone Weil. How could anyone not be? Mystical, intense and crazy, Weil radiates the kind of posthumous aura that dazzles youth and seduces young women. In The Weil ...