A new statistical model appears to undermine long-held assumptions in number theory. How much should it be trusted when all that really matters is proof?
In a major mathematical achievement, a small team of researchers has proven Zimmer’s conjecture.
A visual prank exposes an Achilles’ heel of computer vision systems: Unlike humans, they can’t do a double take.
In math, sometimes the most common things are the hardest to find.
An upstart field that simplifies complex shapes is letting mathematicians understand how those shapes depend on the space in which you visualize them.
The nearest neighbor problem asks where a new point fits into an existing data set. A few researchers set out to prove that there was no universal way to solve it. Instead, they found such a way.
The mathematician Caucher Birkar was born on a subsistence farm and raised in the middle of the brutal war between Iran and Iraq. After fleeing to England, he has gone on to impose order on a wild landscape of mathematical equations.
The mathematician Alessio Figalli is rarely in one place for very long. But his work has established the stability of everything from crystals to weather fronts by using concepts derived from Napoleonic fortifications.
18-year-old Ewin Tang has proven that classical computers can solve the “recommendation problem” nearly as fast as quantum computers. The result eliminates one of the best examples of quantum speedup.