Artificial intelligence has formally verified the prizewinning proof that solved the sphere packing problem in eight dimensions, a result closely tied to Maryna Viazovska’s Fields Medal. The ...

Mathematician Kevin Buzzard of Imperial College London is training computers how to prove one of the most famous problems in math history: Fermat’s last theorem. Resolving the problem isn’t the point.

The same branch of mathematics that helped Einstein to formulate his theory of general relativity could now allow scientists to peer with unprecedented accuracy into impenetrable objects—such as the ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Two mathematicians now say they’ve made progress on a very old unsolved math problem. The problem ...

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Since the start of the 20th century, the heart of mathematics has been the proof — a rigorous, logical argument for whether a given statement is true or false. Mathematicians’ careers are measured by ...

When two mathematicians raised pointed questions about a classic proof that no one really understood, they ignited a years-long debate about how much could be trusted in a new kind of geometry. In the ...

As he was brushing his teeth on the morning of July 17, 2014, Thomas Royen, a little-known retired German statistician, suddenly lit upon the proof of a famous conjecture at the intersection of ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an ...