Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite within reach. In 2012, the mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki claimed he had solved the abc conjecture ...

The quest to make mathematics rigorous has a long and spotty history — one mathematicians can learn from as they push to formalize everything in the computer program Lean. In ancient Greece, Euclid ...

In an attempt to attract more freshmen to theoretical mathematics, the math department expanded its offerings this school year. Last fall, it introduced the MATH 60 “Modern Mathematics: Discrete ...

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. In 1997, Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by IBM, did the unexpected: it defeated chess ...

Despite multiple conferences dedicated to explicating Mochizuki’s proof, number theorists have struggled to come to grips with its underlying ideas. His series of papers, which total more than 500 ...

IFLScience needs the contact information you provide to us to contact you about our products and services. You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time.

Math students may not blink at calculating probabilities, measuring the area beneath curves or evaluating matrices, yet they often find themselves at sea when first confronted with writing proofs.

Ananyo Bhattacharya is chief science writer at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences and the author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann. One of the biggest ...

Two teens say they’ve historically solved Pythagoras’ famous theorem by using trigonometry. New Orleans natives Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson, who attend St. Mary’s Academy, presented their ...