For all of the recent strides we’ve made in the math world—like a supercomputer finally solving the Sum of Three Cubes problem that puzzled mathematicians for 65 years—we’re forever crunching ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 2003, a German graduate student named Britta Späth encountered the McKay conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in the ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

In 2019, mathematicians finally solved one of the hardest math problems—one that had stumped them for decades. It’s called a Diophantine Equation, and it’s sometimes known as the “summing of three ...

After the star-studded mystery thriller The Number 23 debuted in cinemas in 2007, many people became convinced that they were seeing the eponymous number everywhere. I was in school at that time, and ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. In October 2024, news broke that Facebook parent company Meta had cracked an "impossible" problem ...

AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 are steps toward building systems that can reason, which could unlock exciting new capabilities. AI models can easily generate essays and other types of text. However, ...

In new research, mathematicians have narrowed down one of the biggest outstanding problems in math. Huge breakthroughs in math and science are usually the work of many people over many years. Seven ...

In 2003, a German graduate student named Britta Späth encountered the McKay conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in the mathematical realm known as group theory. At first her goals were ...