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Physicists Attack Math’s $1,000,000 Question
...remains arguably the most important unsolved problem in pure mathematics — one whose solution would fetch a $1 million Millennium Prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute. Conversely, as the number...
How to Use a Sphere to Talk to Mars
To avoid garbled messages, mathematicians might translate them into geometric form. It’s hard to send a message from Mars. When the Curiosity rover, currently active on the surface of the...
The New Familiar Quanta
...bring you the very best coverage of mathematics and basic science news. Over the years, thanks to you, our audience has multiplied. We have expanded into new forms of journalism...
Why Quantum Computers Might Not Break Cryptography
...is interesting to see that the conventional wisdom is wrong.” Math is hard. Indeed, much of the modern infrastructure for secure communication depends heavily on the difficulty of elementary mathematics...
A Puzzle of Clever Connections Nears a Happy End
The three young friends who devised the “happy ending” problem became some of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century, but were never able to solve their own puzzle....
Cash for Math: The Erdős Prizes Live On
...third mathematician involved, Paul Erdős, became perhaps the most notorious mathematician of the 20th century. Erdős spent nearly his entire life crashing on other mathematicians’ couches and subsisting on the...
Yitang Zhang’s Santa Barbara Beach Walk
...of China’s top math students and completing his doctorate at Purdue University in Indiana, for seven years Zhang could not find work as a mathematician. At one point, he worked...
A Path Less Taken to the Peak of the Math World
...a theorem by the German mathematician David Hilbert that stands as one of the most important breakthroughs in 20th-century mathematics. Read the related Abstractions post: The Tricky Translation of Mathematical...
The Tricky Translation of Mathematical Ideas
Big advances in math can happen when mathematicians move ideas into areas where they seem like they shouldn’t belong. My latest story is about the mathematician June Huh, who came...