Mathematicians just made a big leap forward on one of the field’s all-time favorite problems. Curves—squiggly lines through space, such as a comet’s trajectory or a stock market trend—are some of math ...

From Aryabhata’s concept of zero and Euclid’s geometryto the principles that later powered modern computer science, mathematics has been shaped by thinkers across eras. This particular list focuses on ...

Sometimes work in one discipline of pure mathematics has a completely unexpected payoff in another. Some of the famous mathematician Pierre de Fermat’s (1601–1665) work in number theory bears this out ...

Mathematicians have illuminated what sets of points can look like if the distances between them are all whole numbers. The change of plans came on a road trip. On a beautiful day last April, the ...

For centuries prime numbers have captured the imaginations of mathematicians, who continue to search for new patterns that help them identify primes and the way they are distributed among other ...

A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime numbers. The primes — numbers that are only divisible by themselves ...