The Langlands programme has inspired and befuddled mathematicians for more than 50 years. A major advance has now opened up ...

Computers can help ensure that mathematical proofs are correct, but translating traditional maths into a machine-readable ...

Zhou Zhongpeng, a 28-year-old Peking University doctoral dropout turned tech engineer, has deciphered one of mathematics’ most cryptic frontiers dubbed the “alien’s language” for its ...

After 32 years in the classroom, I’m officially retiring from teaching high school math. It’s a bittersweet goodbye to a profession I have loved since the day I first picked up a piece of ...

For a long time, the Kakeya conjecture, which involves rotating an infinitely narrow needle, kept mathematicians guessing—until now ...

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 t ...

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 ...

The conjecture—which is about the different ways you can navigate the mathematical mazes called graphs when they’re stacked on top of each other like bunk beds—seemed natural, even self-evident.

Yale professor Sam Raskin led a team to prove the geometric Langlands conjecture, solving a major part of one of math’s most sweeping paradigms.

Much of mathematics is driven by intuition, by a deep-rooted sense of what should be true. But sometimes instinct can lead a mathematician astray. Early evidence might not represent the bigger picture ...