This is an updated version of a story first published on May 5, 2024. For many high school students returning to class, it may seem like geometry and trigonometry were created by the Greeks as a form ...
AI could soon spew out hundreds of mathematical proofs that look "right" but contain hidden flaws, or proofs so complex we ...
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 ...
Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite within reach. In 2012, the mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki claimed he had solved the abc conjecture ...
There’s a curious contradiction at the heart of today’s most capable AI models that purport to “reason”: They can solve routine math problems with accuracy, yet when faced with formulating deeper ...
Mathematics is often regarded as the ideal domain for measuring AI progress effectively. Math’s step-by-step logic is easy to track, and its definitive automatically verifiable answers remove any ...
In the 1970s, the late mathematician Paul Cohen, the only person to ever win a Fields Medal for work in mathematical logic, reportedly made a sweeping prediction that continues to excite and irritate ...