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 ...

In 1978, the mathematician John McKay noticed what seemed like an odd coincidence. He had been studying the different ways of representing the structure of a mysterious entity called the monster group ...

Galois was just 20 years old when he was shot in a mysterious duel — but not before revolutionizing mathematics. The night ...

It's been more than 20 years since Rubik's Cube, the maddening, multicolored brainchild of a Hungarian architect teacher, hit the American market full force. Now, two decades after the cube craze ...

A 17-year-old student has shaken the mathematics world by toppling a theory that stood unchallenged for over 40 years. Hannah Cairo's research, published in February on the online science archive ...

Representation theory was initially dismissed. Today, it’s central to much of mathematics. When representation theory emerged in the late 19th century, many mathematicians questioned its worth. In ...