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Why the Legendary Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI
AI’s greatest mathematical successes have come from answers to problems posed by a mid-20th century iconoclast. By examining what makes the Erdős problems unique, mathematicians are trying to understand how...
Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons?
...on cue, another “hold my beer” moment: Google DeepMind and the mathematician Terence Tao (the GOAT!) used AI to rediscover or improve the solutions to 67 problems “spanning mathematical analysis,...
How Fast Is the Universe Really Expanding?
...like, I’m guessing about 35 years from the time. When you were an undergraduate in a class that I was teaching in the math department at MIT, it was a...
A Master of the Traveling Salesperson Problem Finds His Own Path
...seemingly unrelated subject: understanding the best way to choose randomly from a large collection of mathematical objects. For these efforts and others, Oveis Gharan has received the International Mathematical Union’s...
Living Fully in the Math World Means Threading the Needle
...2026 Fields Medal, widely regarded as math’s highest honor, given to exceptionally accomplished mathematicians under 40. Wang, 35, a professor of mathematics at New York University and the Institute for...
Sometimes Being First Means Seeing the End Before Anyone Else
...said. Mathematicians debate the utility of competition math as preparation for a research career. Many argue that it encourages the wrong mindset, because competition problems are guaranteed to have answers,...
The Quietest Mathematician Has Always Been Worth Listening To
The Quietest Mathematician Was Always Worth Listening To John Pardon sees connections between different areas of math that others don’t. For that vision, he’s now been awarded a Fields Medal....
Amid Life’s Chaos, a Meticulous Mathematician Finds Stability
...said. “Either Go or math. Since I lost, I decided to move my focus to math.” He set a goal: to compete in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the most...
The 17-Year-Old Student Who Solved a Major Math Mystery
When Hannah Cairo was a 17-year-old high school student, she did something mathematicians had been unable to do for four decades: she overturned the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a famous prediction about how wave energy behaves. In this video, Cairo and the mathematicians she worked with explain how she found the counterexample and what it means for the field.