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 ...

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

The Poincaré conjecture can be understood by analogy with the case in two dimensions. A two-dimensional space, or surface, is like a bubble made from an infinitely thin film of soap. If the bubble is ...

The artificial intelligence (AI) program DeepMind has gotten closer to proving a math conjecture that's bedeviled mathematicians for decades and revealed another new conjecture that may unravel how ...

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 ...

A mathematician has solved a 30-year-old problem at the boundary between mathematics and computer science. He used an innovative, elegant proof that has his colleagues marveling at its simplicity. Hao ...