The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 2003, a German graduate student named Britta Späth encountered the McKay conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in the ...

In ancient Greece, Euclid showed that if you agree on a small list of preliminary principles, or axioms, you can use deductive reasoning to reveal all sorts of new mathematical truths. But although ...

Word problems try and tell students a story about the math problem in front of them. They are a useful way to connect abstract numbers to concrete situations, so students can learn early on to apply ...

In October 2024 I attended a workshop at Harvard University where mathematicians talked through the uses of artificial intelligence in their field. Most were less worried about the future of math than ...