For over a decade, mathematicians have failed to agree whether a 500-page proof is actually correct. Now, translating the ...

For close to 40 years, a simple little hypothesis has been quietly sitting in a corner of graph theory, minding its own business. Known as the “bunkbed conjecture”, it always seemed kind of ...

Hannah Cairo found herself stuck on a problem that wouldn’t leave her mind. It wasn’t a regular homework assignment—it was a decades-old mathematical puzzle believed to be true by leading experts in ...

It is rare to read about “spectacular progress” or a “once-in-a-century” result in mathematics. That’s for good reason: if a problem has not had a solution for many years, then completely new ...

Giving birth to a conjecture — a proposition that is suspected to be true, but needs definitive proof — can feel to a mathematician like a moment of divine inspiration. Mathematical conjectures are ...

The Riemann hypothesis is the most important open question in number theory—if not all of mathematics. It has occupied experts for more than 160 years. And the problem appeared both in mathematician ...

Ananyo Bhattacharya is chief science writer at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences and the author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann. One of the biggest ...

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, ...