Mathematicians thought they were on the cusp of proving a conjecture about the ancient structures known as Apollonian circles. But a summer project would lead to its downfall. Summer Haag and Clyde ...

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 ...

As a girl, I too was attracted to Simone Weil. How could anyone not be? Mystical, intense and crazy, Weil radiates the kind of posthumous aura that dazzles youth and seduces young women. In The Weil ...

Hannah Cairo found herself stuck on a problem that wouldn’t leave her mind. It wasn’t a regular homework assignment—it was a decades-old mathematical puzzle believed to be true by leading experts in ...

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 ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. A mathematician has solved a 30-year-old problem at the boundary between mathematics and computer ...

The Poincaré conjecture can be understood by analogy with the case in two dimensions. A two-dimensional space, or surface, is like a bubble made from an infinitely thin film of soap. If the bubble is ...