Mathematics

On his way to winning a Fields Medal, James Maynard has cut a path through simple-sounding questions about prime numbers that have stumped mathematicians for centuries.

With Hugo Duminil-Copin, thinking rarely happens without moving. His insights into the flow-related properties of complex networks have earned him the Fields Medal.

June Huh wasn’t interested in mathematics until a chance encounter during his sixth year of college. Now his profound insights connecting combinatorics and geometry have led to math’s highest honor.

With her homeland mired in war, the sphere-packing number theorist Maryna Viazovska has become the second woman to win a Fields Medal in the award’s 86-year history.

The quest to solve cubic equations led to duels, betrayals — and modern mathematics.

Artificial intelligence has bested humans at problem-solving challenges like chess and Go. Is mathematics research next? Steven Strogatz speaks with mathematician Kevin Buzzard to learn about the effort to translate math into language that computers understand.

In recreational mathematics, the balance scale is an endless source of puzzles that require precise and elaborate logic and teach the fundamentals of generalization.

A new proof identifies precisely how large a mathematical graph must be before it contains a regular substructure.

For decades mathematicians have searched for a specific pair of surfaces that can’t be transformed into each other in four-dimensional space. Now they’ve found them.