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 ...

Despite multiple conferences dedicated to explicating Mochizuki’s proof, number theorists have struggled to come to grips with its underlying ideas. His series of papers, which total more than 500 ...

A Russian mathematician may have finally cracked one of the most famous problems in mathematics: the Poincaré conjecture, a question about the shapes of three-dimensional spaces. If his work is ...

One of the biggest stories in science is quietly playing out in the world of abstract mathematics. Over the course of last year, researchers fulfilled a decades-old dream when they unveiled a proof of ...

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 ...

Monstrous moonshine, a quirky pattern of the monster group in theoretical math, has a shadow - umbral moonshine. Mathematicians have now proved this insight, known as the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture, ...

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 ...

Three years ago, a solitary mathematician released an impenetrable proof of the famous abc conjecture. At a recent conference dedicated to the work, optimism mixed with bafflement. Earlier this month ...

In about 900 B.C., the Phoenician princess Dido—overthrown by her ruthless brother—fled to Africa to buy land for herself and her followers. As told in Virgil's Aeneid, King Jarbas offered her as much ...

A mathematical problem more than 300 years old gets a formal proof with the help of computer formal verification. A team led by mathematician Thomas Hales has delivered a formal proof of the Kepler ...