A team of four prominent mathematicians, including two Fields medalists, proved a conjecture described as a “holy grail of additive combinatorics.” Within a month, a loose collaboration verified it ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in ...

How does a revolution start? Sometimes, it’s a simple question. For Sarah Powell, an associate professor of special education at the University of Texas at Austin, the question was this math problem: ...

In math, Algebra 1 is a make-or-break course. The class is the gateway to high school math, and struggling to complete it can close off those higher-level pathways—and even jeopardize students’ ...

Simple mathematical concepts such as counting appear to be firmly anchored in the natural process of thinking. Studies have shown that even very young children and animals possess such skills to a ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last ...

For thousands of years, philosophers have pondered cardinality: knowing “how many.” Using a series of crude estimates, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes worked out the approximate number of ...

Descriptive set theorists study the niche mathematics of infinity. Now, they’ve shown that their problems can be rewritten in the concrete language of algorithms. All of modern mathematics is built on ...