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 ...

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, ...

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

Goldbach’s conjecture is one of the best-known unsolved problems in mathematics. It is a simple matter to check the conjecture for a few cases: 8 = 5+3, 16 = 13+3, 36 = 29+7.

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.

A team of mathematicians has solved a math problem first posed more than 40 years ago. It took three mathematicians almost 15 years to solve the famous Rota’s Conjecture – a theory first posed ...

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 ...

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.