These are math’s most famous open questions. Solve one, and you’ll win a $1-million prize—but it’s only happened once since ...

After 30 months of fast-paced innovation in quantum algorithms, six research groups are hoping to hit paydirt. But there can be only one big winner—if there is a winner at all. I’m standing in front ...

In 2019, Monte Leifheit, a warehouse operator at 3M, noticed his left eye was bloodshot and swollen. What began as a minor irritation turned into a yearlong medical odyssey marked by the lack of a ...

Some readers may solve the problem procedurally: line up the two numbers, add the ones column, carry the one, and add the tens to get 43. Others might instead notice a creative shortcut: 29 + 14 is ...

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At a secret meeting in 2025, some of the world's leading mathematicians gathered to test OpenAI's newest large language model, o4-mini. Experts at the meeting were amazed by how much the model's ...

Your brain could be gently coaxed into working on complex problems while you sleep, making you better able to tackle them the next day. Now, Karen Konkoly at Northwestern University in Illinois and ...

Mathematics, like many other scientific endeavors, is increasingly using artificial intelligence. Of course, math is the backbone of AI, but mathematicians are also turning to these tools for tasks ...

Five years ago, mathematicians Dawei Chen and Quentin Gendron were trying to untangle a difficult area of algebraic geometry involving differentials, elements of calculus used to measure distance ...

In October 2024, news broke that Facebook parent company Meta had cracked an "impossible" problem that had stymied mathematicians for a century. In this case, the solvers weren't human. An artificial ...

Among high school students and adults, girls and women are much more likely to use traditional, step-by-step algorithms to solve basic math problems – such as lining up numbers to add, starting with ...