It is rare to read about “spectacular progress” or a “once-in-a-century” result in mathematics. That’s for good reason: if a problem has not had a solution for many years, then completely new ...

A team of four prominent mathematicians, including two Fields medalists, proved a conjecture described as a “holy grail of additive combinatorics.” Within a month, a loose collaboration verified it ...

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 ...

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 ...

If pure math can teach us anything, it’s this: occasionally, your special interest might just change the world. For Joshua Zahl and Hong Wang, that special interest was the Kakeya conjecture. “I read ...

At first glance, the problem seems ridiculously simple. And yet experts have been searching for a solution in vain for decades. According to mathematician Jeffrey Lagarias, number theorist Shizuo ...