Consider a pencil lying on your desk. Try to spin it around so that it points once in every direction, but make sure it sweeps over as little of the desk’s surface as possible. You might twirl the ...

Like the elements in chemistry, prime numbers serve as building blocks in the mathematics of whole numbers. Evenly divisible only by themselves and one, primes are a rich source of speculative ideas ...

Mahesh Kakde, professor of mathematics at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru(Infosysprize.org) Winner of the the Infosys Prize 2022 in Mathematics for his contributions to algebraic number ...

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 ...

It is well-known that our intuition is not perfect. We are predictably irrational in a huge number of ways in our everyday lives. But what about something a bit more sophisticated? Are there times ...

An artificial intelligence has disproved five mathematical conjectures – unproven theorems – despite not being equipped with any information about the problems. Adam Zsolt Wagner at Tel Aviv ...

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 ...

A new approach has chipped away at a famously unsolved math problem. The Erdos-Turan conjecture in additive combinatorics is one of the longest lasting unsolved problems. The two mathematicians used ...