Profiles

At 86, Britain’s preeminent mathematical matchmaker is still tackling the big questions and dreaming of a union between the quantum and the gravitational forces.

Nima Arkani-Hamed is championing a campaign to build the world’s largest particle collider, even as he pursues a new vision of the laws of nature.

The mathematician John Horton Conway’s myriad accomplishments — including the Game of Life, sprouts and the surreal numbers — are the product of a mind at play.

A mathematician who has analyzed card shuffling for decades is tackling one final nemesis: “smooshing.”

Two years ago, Yitang Zhang was virtually unknown. Now his surprise solution to a major problem in number theory has catapulted him to mathematical stardom. Where does he go from here?

Subhash Khot’s bold conjecture is helping mathematicians explore the precise limits of computation.

Martin Hairer was named a 2014 Fields medalist for an epic masterpiece in stochastic analysis that colleagues say “created a whole world.”

Maryam Mirzakhani, who became the first woman Fields medalist for drawing deep connections between topology, geometry and dynamical systems, has died of cancer at the age of 40. This is our 2014 profile of her life and work.

Artur Avila’s solutions to ubiquitous problems in chaos theory have “changed the face of the field,” earning him Brazil’s first Fields Medal.