Latest Articles
‘Sensational’ Proof Delivers New Insights Into Prime Numbers
The proof creates stricter limits on potential exceptions to the famous Riemann hypothesis.
How America’s Fastest Swimmers Use Math to Win Gold
Number theorist Ken Ono is teaching Olympians to swim more efficiently.
How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number
Useful mathematical concepts, like the number line, can linger for millennia before they are rigorously defined.
How Failure Has Made Mathematics Stronger
The topologist Danny Calegari discusses the inevitability of disappointment in math, and how to learn from it.
Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjecture
Mathematicians have disproved a major conjecture about the relationship between curvature and shape.
Mathematicians Marvel at ‘Crazy’ Cuts Through Four Dimensions
Topologists prove two new results that bring some order to the confoundingly difficult study of four-dimensional shapes.
Michel Talagrand Wins Abel Prize for Work Wrangling Randomness
The French mathematician spent decades developing a set of tools now widely used for taming random processes.
‘The Rest of the World Disappears’: Claire Voisin on Mathematical Creativity
The recipient of the 2024 Crafoord Prize in Mathematics discusses math as art, math as language, and math as abstract thought.
‘Entropy Bagels’ and Other Complex Structures Emerge From Simple Rules
Simple rules in simple settings continue to puzzle mathematicians, even as they devise intricate tools to analyze them.