There are few things more pleasing to your average mathematician than when a result surprises you. Take e, for example – a ...

A type of chaos found in everything from prime numbers to turbulence can unify a pair of unrelated ideas, revealing a ...

For centuries, mathematicians have categorized infinities into a kind of ladder. The infinite set of natural numbers (1, 2, 3 ...

This month, the mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck became the first woman to win one of the field’s most prestigious awards, the Abel Prize, which is awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters ...

Experienced mathematicians warn up-and-comers to stay away from the Collatz conjecture. It’s a siren song, they say: Fall under its trance and you may never do meaningful work again. The Collatz ...

As an applied mathematician, the tech firm’s founder shares his research that reveals quantum’s inflection point is here with ...

It might have escaped lay people at the time, but for some observers the ascension of Leo XIV as head of the Catholic Church this year was a reminder that the last time a Pope Leo sat in St. Peter’s ...

A famous problem in mathematics that has remained unsolved for almost 160 years probably still is — despite a new claim by a retired mathematician that he has cracked it. Michael Atiyah, a professor ...

Robbert Dijkgraaf is the director and Leon Levy professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. John Forbes Nash Jr., the subject of the 2001 Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, and his ...

Most of us first hear about the irrational number π (pi)—rounded off as 3.14, with an infinite number of decimal digits—in ...

Black holes are usually cast as cosmic dead ends, places where matter and information vanish without a trace. A new mathematical model instead treats them as potential junctions, suggesting that under ...