For close to 40 years, a simple little hypothesis has been quietly sitting in a corner of graph theory, minding its own business. Known as the “bunkbed conjecture”, it always seemed kind of ...

Measured against that, the Kakeya conjecture – a problem stemming from a 1917 thought experiment by Japanese mathematician ...

Mathematicians still believe the physics statement about connected locations within solids that inspired the bunkbed conjecture. But they’ll need to find a different way to prove it. In the meantime, ...

Mathematicians still believe the physics statement about connected locations within solids that inspired the bunkbed conjecture. But they’ll need to find a different way to prove it.

Mathematics, it turns out, is full of “undecidable” statements. In a similar vein, it’s also full of computationally undecidable problems—problems that cannot be solved by any algorithm in ...

The conjecture itself can be formulated so simply that even primary school students understand it. Take a natural number. If it is odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1; if it is even, divide it by 2.

The playful side of math. But what Haag and Kertzer found even more gratifying than disproving a major outstanding conjecture was experiencing first-hand the creative side of mathematics research. It ...

In 2019, mathematicians finally solved one of the hardest math problems—one that had stumped them for decades. It’s called a Diophantine Equation, and it’s sometimes known as the “summing ...

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 ...

But sometimes instinct can lead a mathematician astray. Early evidence might not represent the bigger picture; a statement might seem obvious, only for some hidden subtlety to reveal itself.