The world may seem orderly, but randomness and chaos shape everything in the universe, from enormous galaxies all the way down to subatomic particles. Take a chilly window sheeting over with ice: even ...

Mathematicians have finally solved a geometry problem that has puzzled the field for decades. By wiggling a needle around while spinning it, you can minimize the amount of space it moves through, ...

Mathematicians from New York University and the University of British Columbia have resolved a decades-old geometric problem, the Kakeya conjecture in 3D, which studies the shape left behind by a ...

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, ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Much of mathematics is driven by intuition, by a deep-rooted sense of what should be true. But sometimes instinct can lead a ...

After over three decades, five academic studies and one thousand pages, a team led by Yale Professor Sam Raskin has solved a part of what some consider math’s “Rosetta Stone.” Raskin led a nine-person ...

At first glance, the problem seems ridiculously simple. And yet experts have been searching for a solution in vain for decades. According to mathematician Jeffrey Lagarias, number theorist Shizuo ...

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 ...

An attempt at tackling the intractable Collatz conjecture is a “noble failure” demonstrating the promise of automated reasoning techniques. The computer scientist Marijn Heule is always on the lookout ...

Fresh off an impressive 2019 track and field season, Alex Collatz Sellens was looking forward to big things last year before events were interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the former ...