Erica Klarreich

The mathematician Daniel Litt has driven social media users to distraction with a series of simple-seeming but counterintuitive probability puzzles.

In work that has been 30 years in the making, mathematicians have proved a major part of a profound mathematical vision called the Langlands program.

Mathematicians have illuminated what sets of points can look like if the distances between them are all whole numbers.

New work attacks a long-standing barrier to understanding how prime numbers are distributed.

The surprisingly simple tile is the first single, connected tile that can fill the entire plane in a pattern that never repeats — and can’t be made to fill it in a repeating way.

The prize-winning geometer feels most fulfilled when exploring the fertile ground where constraint meets creation.

Mathematicians have uncovered a surprising wealth of rock-paper-scissors-like patterns in randomly chosen dice.

The work — the first-ever limit on how many whole numbers can be written as the sum of two cubed fractions — makes significant headway on “a recurring embarrassment for number theorists.”

The decades-old Sullivan’s conjecture, about the best way to minimize the surface area of a bubble cluster, was thought to be out of reach for three bubbles and up — until a new breakthrough result.