Kevin Hartnett

Today Google announced that it achieved “quantum supremacy.” Its chief quantum computing rival, IBM, said it hasn’t. The disagreement hinges on what the term really means.

A major advance toward solving the 60-year-old sunflower conjecture is shedding light on how order begins to appear as random systems grow in size.

Two monumental works have led many mathematicians to avoid the equal sign. The process has not always gone smoothly.

The twin primes conjecture is one of the most important and difficult questions in mathematics. Two mathematicians have solved a parallel version of the problem for small number systems.

In some ways, machine vision is superior to human vision. In other ways, it may never catch up.

Mathematicians and neuroscientists have created the first anatomically accurate model that explains how vision is possible.

The ancient Greeks wondered when “irrational” numbers can be approximated by fractions. By proving the longstanding Duffin-Schaeffer conjecture, two mathematicians have provided a complete answer.

Researchers are getting close to building a quantum computer that can perform tasks a classical computer can’t. Here’s what the milestone will mean.

Randomness would seem to make a mathematical statement harder to prove. In fact, it often does the opposite.