You enter a cave. At the end of a dark corridor, you encounter a pair of sealed chambers. Inside each chamber is an all-knowing wizard. The prophecy says that with these oracles’ help, you can learn ...

The Hechinger Report covers one topic: education. Sign up for our newsletters to have stories delivered to your inbox. Consider becoming a member to support our nonprofit journalism. Sarah Powell, an ...

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 ...

A mathematician will turn a groundbreaking 100-page proof into computer code. The proof tool, Lean, lets users turn proofs written in prose into rules and logic for testing. Kevin Buzzard already uses ...

In the 1970s, the late mathematician Paul Cohen, the only person to ever win a Fields Medal for work in mathematical logic, reportedly made a sweeping prediction that continues to excite and irritate ...

Every day, dozens of like-minded mathematicians gather on an online forum called Zulip to build what they believe is the future of their field. They’re all devotees of a software program called Lean.

As artificial intelligence (AI) takes on increasingly critical roles—from managing power grids to piloting autonomous ...

Mathematics is traditionally a solitary science. In 1986 Andrew Wiles withdrew to his study for seven years to prove Fermat’s theorem. The resulting proofs are often difficult for colleagues to ...

This is an updated version of a story first published on May 5, 2024. For many high school students returning to class, it may seem like geometry and trigonometry were created by the Greeks as a form ...

There’s a curious contradiction at the heart of today’s most capable AI models that purport to “reason”: They can solve routine math problems with accuracy, yet when faced with formulating deeper ...

In 2022, two high school students created a trigonometric proof of the Pythagorean Theorem—something that’s only ever been accomplished by a few professional mathematicians. Now, a new article not ...