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 ...

A pair of mathematicians has solved the first chunk of one of the most famous conjectures about the additive properties of whole numbers. Proposed more than 60 years ago by the legendary Hungarian ...

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 ...

DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve helps solve a math puzzle with Terence Tao, showing how AI can now invent new ideas—and prove old ones ...

The artificial intelligence (AI) program DeepMind has gotten closer to proving a math conjecture that's bedeviled mathematicians for decades and revealed another new conjecture that may unravel how ...

Pick a number; if it is even, divide it by 2; if odd, triple it and add 1. Now repeat the process, each time halving or else tripling and adding 1. Here is a surprise: no matter what number you pick, ...

Fermat’s last theorem is just one of many examples of innocent-looking problems that can long stymie even the most astute mathematicians. It took about 350 years to prove Fermat’s scribbled conjecture ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

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 ...

Caroline Klivans, senior lecturer in applied mathematics and computer science, achieved every student’s dream and proved her former advisor wrong. The Partitionability Conjecture was postulated by ...