The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Much of mathematics is driven by intuition, by a deep-rooted sense of what should be true. But sometimes instinct can lead a ...

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 ...

Summer Haag and Clyde Kertzer made major news in the math world while working on a summer research project Prior to the end of the 2022-2023 academic year, graduate student Summer Haag and junior ...

Mathematicians have proved a key building block of the Langlands programme, sometimes referred to as a “grand unified theory” of maths due to the deep links it proposes between seemingly distant ...

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 ...

The Collatz conjecture is also known as the “3n + 1” problem. It’s an easy problem to explain and check, and has been tested up into the nineteen figure range. But it’s only now that anyone has come ...