Infinity used to be the place where mathematics ran out of road, a hazy horizon rather than a mapped landscape. Now a pair of ...

We’ve created a generation — parents and children alike — paralyzed by numerators without denominators. A single alarming ...

A new study reveals that Srinivasa Ramanujan’s century-old formulas for calculating pi unexpectedly emerge within modern theories of critical phenomena, turbulence, and black holes. In school, many of ...

Most of us first hear about the irrational number π (pi)—rounded off as 3.14, with an infinite number of decimal digits—in ...

But primes are often considered the building blocks of mathematics, and math itself is the scaffolding that supports ...

Researchers have used metamathematical techniques to show that certain theorems that look superficially distinct are in fact ...

New calculation of viral spread based on branching process theory suggests that rapid elimination of SARS-CoV-2-like viruses ...

What is the most important number in the entirety of mathematics? Ok, that’s a pretty silly question – out of infinite possibilities, how could you possibly choose? I suppose a big hitter like 2 or 10 ...

Mathematics was not invented by one man, but rather a great tale of the human search for understanding and explanation of the world. It developed over time, influenced by countless cultures and great ...

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 ...

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 ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...