Tao has made huge progress on the Collatz conjecture, a simple-seeming puzzle that has bedeviled hapless…
Author: Kevin Hartnett
Is the Equal Sign Overrated? Mathematicians Hash It Out
Many of them avoid the equal sign, hoping to promote a looser relationship of “equivalence” instead.…
A Big Question About Prime Numbers Gets a Partial Answer
The twin primes conjecture has bedeviled mathematicians for more than a century. Now there's a solution…
A Single Math Model Explains Many Mysteries of Vision
The first anatomically correct model of the visual cortex seeks to capture how the brain sees…
A Major Proof Shows How to Approximate Numbers Like Pi
The ancient Greeks wondered when irrational numbers, like pi, can be represented with fractions. Two mathematicians…
Mathematicians Discover the Perfect Way to Multiply
Most of us rely on the "carrying method" when we multiply. But there's a much faster…
Neural Networks Need a Cookbook. Here Are the Ingredients
We know very little about how neural networks actually work. But mathematicians are developing a theory…
Quantum Communication Can Travel Faster—It’s Not Just a Myth
A new experiment showed for the first time that quantum messages can indeed be speedier than…
A Huge Achievement in Math Shows the Limits of Symmetries
A new proof resolves Zimmer’s conjecture, which has to do with what symmetries can exist in…