A few weeks ago I was listening to one of my favorite radio shows, BBC Radio 4's In Our Time. It's about as adult-contemporary as a podcast gets: a roundtable of British academics talking about one ...

Polynomial equations are a cornerstone of modern science, providing a mathematical basis for celestial mechanics, computer graphics, market growth predictions and much more. But although most high ...

Somewhere at the edge of mathematics lurks a number so large that it breaks the very foundations of our understanding - and ...

How many atoms are there in the observable universe? Current estimates point to a number we would write as 1 followed by 80 zeroes, or 10 80. If you peered inside each of these atoms and counted their ...

Since the start of the 20th century, the heart of mathematics has been the proof — a rigorous, logical argument for whether a given statement is true or false. Mathematicians’ careers are measured by ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. In October 2024, news broke that Facebook parent company Meta had cracked an "impossible" problem ...

A defining memory from my senior year of high school was a nine-hour math exam with just six questions. Six of the top scorers won slots on the U.S. team for the International Math Olympiad (IMO), the ...

Mathematicians may have a better way to measure agreement across different datasets. Agreement affects reproducibility, meta-analysis, and prediction to fill in missing data points. We need a more ...

If you want to know when mathematicians are about to have a breakthrough, you don’t need to look inside their heads. Just watch their movements at a chalkboard. “I’ve always been super intrigued by ...

AI believer: Sanjeev Arora on the stage at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum explaining his ideas about superhuman AI mathematicians. (Courtesy: Christian Flemming/HLF) When researchers at Microsoft ...

Two mathematicians have used a new geometric approach in order to address a very old problem in algebra. In school, we often learn how to multiply out and factor polynomial equations like (x² – 1) or ...