What makes a proof stronger than a guess? What does evidence look like in the realm of mathematical abstraction? Hear the mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood explain how probability helps to guide ...

About a decade ago Tonan Kamata, now a mathematician at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), stood mesmerized in front of a math museum’s origamilike exhibit. It featured a ...

An attempt to fix problems with a controversial mathematical proof has itself become mired in controversy, in the latest twist in a saga that has been running for over a decade and has seen ...

A mathematical breakthrough made this year is so complex that other mathematicians struggled to understand it, but it has already led to progress in other areas of maths. In May, Sam Raskin at Yale ...

Mathematicians explore ideas by proposing conjectures and proving them with theorems. For centuries, they built these proofs line by careful line, and most math researchers still work like that today.

All equals are not created equal—mathematicians sometimes play fast and loose. In programming, equal signs mean different things, and variables have different types. Turning intuitive math expertise ...

Nobel Laureate John Nash GS '50 sat in the fifth row of Taplin Auditorium yesterday afternoon. Andrew Wiles, the man who proved Fermat's Last Theorem 10 years ago, sat two rows closer. All told, more ...

Like many math students, I had dreams of mathematical greatness. I thought I was close once. A difficult algebra problem in college kept me working late into the night. After hours of struggle, I felt ...

Talia Ringer is in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, 61801, USA. Read the paper: Olympiad-level formal mathematical ...

As he was brushing his teeth on the morning of July 17, 2014, Thomas Royen, a little-known retired German statistician, suddenly lit upon the proof of a famous conjecture at the intersection of ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Dr. Lance B. Eliot is a world-renowned AI scientist and consultant. In today’s column, I examine an insightful AI research study ...