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Mathematics

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A Century Later, New Math Smooths Out General Relativity

November 30, 2023

Mathematicians prove a theorem that illuminates the geometry of universes with tiny amounts of mass.

Pierre de Fermat’s Link to a High School Student’s Prime Math Proof

November 22, 2023

How Fermat’s less famous "little theorem" got mathematicians young and old to play with prime-like Carmichael numbers.

The Astonishing Behavior of Recursive Sequences

November 16, 2023

Some strange mathematical sequences are always whole numbers — until they’re not. The puzzling patterns have revealed ties to graph theory and prime numbers, awing mathematicians.

Why the Human Brain Perceives Small Numbers Better

November 9, 2023

The discovery that the brain has different systems for representing small and large numbers provokes new questions about memory, attention and mathematics.

In the ‘Wild West’ of Geometry, Mathematicians Redefine the Sphere

November 7, 2023

High-dimensional spheres can have a much wider variety of structures than mathematicians thought possible.

The Hidden Connection That Changed Number Theory

November 1, 2023

Quadratic reciprocity lurks around many corners in mathematics. By proving it, number theorists reimagined their whole field.

A Brief History of Tricky Mathematical Tiling

October 30, 2023

The discovery earlier this year of the “hat” tile marked the culmination of hundreds of years of work into tiles and their symmetries.

A New Generation of Mathematicians Pushes Prime Number Barriers

October 26, 2023

New work attacks a long-standing barrier to understanding how prime numbers are distributed.

The Mathematician Who Sculpted the Shape of Space

October 16, 2023

Eugenio Calabi, who died on September 25, conceived of novel geometric objects that later became fundamental to string theory.

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