Browsing: Mathematicians

In the ongoing campaign by artificial intelligence companies to take over pure mathematics, another round is commencing.The team behind First Proof, an effort to benchmark the…

Celebrate Pi Day and read about how this number pops up across math and science on our special Pi Day page.For more than two millennia, mathematicians…

I still remember the movie night when I first watched Good Will Hunting with my mom. Matt Damon played a janitor at the Massachusetts Institute of…

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…

February 9, 20262 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAmMathematicians issue a major challenge to AI: show us your workFrustrated by AI industry claims of proving…

Imagine that you want to know the most efficient way to make a torus—a doughnut-shaped mathematical object—from origami paper. But this torus, which is a surface,…

November 10, 20252 min readScientists See ‘Eureka’ Moments in Mathematicians’ Chalkboard WritingsResearchers spot the “tipping point” before mathematicians’ moments of discoveryBy Matthew Hutson edited by Sarah…

October 28, 20252 min readThis New Shape Breaks an ‘Unbreakable’ 3D Geometry RuleThe noperthedron has a surprising property—which disproves a long-standing conjectureBy Emma R. Hasson edited…

Prime numbers are sometimes called math’s “atoms” because they can be divided by only themselves and 1. For two millennia, mathematicians have wondered if the prime…

A defining memory from my senior year of high school was a nine-hour math exam with just six questions. Six of the top scorers won slots…