Joan Birman popularized the Burau representation problem decades ago. Now she and two colleagues have a proof that reveals ...

Don't underestimate the power of a yes-or-no question. Some of the toughest computing problems boil down to thousands of tiny ...

On this occasion, the honor goes to Andrzej Odrzywołek, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Jagiellonian University, Kraków. In a recently updated, ...

Isolating the first spark of life on Earth is a matter of biology, geology, and chemistry—but it's also an amazing math problem. At least, that's how Varun Varanasi viewed it when he was a Yale ...

Isolating the first spark of life on Earth is a matter of biology, geology, and chemistry — but it’s also an amazing math problem. At least, that’s how Varun Varanasi ’24 viewed it when he was a Yale ...

A Mathematician with early access to XAI Grok 4.20, found a new Bellman function for one of the problems he had been working on with my student N. Alpay. Not an Erdős problem, but original research.

When engineers build AI language models like GPT-5 from training data, at least two major processing features emerge: memorization (reciting exact text they’ve seen before, like famous quotes or ...

The rise of AI, graphic processing, combinatorial optimization and other data-intensive applications has resulted in data-processing bottlenecks, as ever greater amounts of data must be shuttled back ...

You can probably think of a time when you’ve used math to solve an everyday problem, such as calculating a tip at a restaurant or determining the square footage of a room. But what role does math play ...

Maria is either at home or in the office. She’s not at home. Where is she? You might wonder why I started with such an unpuzzling puzzle. But in solving it, you already used logic. You reasoned ...