All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in general, research mathematicians don’t need to think about it ...

Scientists recently announced progress on an elusive problem from 1960 known as the Sunflower Conjecture. While it doesn’t involve any plant biology, it does deal with objects called “mathematical ...

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made artificial intelligence more adaptable than ever before, but that comes with a drawback: lies. Generative AI tends to make things up, but ...

If you are interested in learning about the easiest math problems that look hard, then you have come to the right place. Many people consider mathematics to be tough, and if you are one of them, then ...

For all of the recent strides we’ve made in the math world—like a supercomputer finally solving the Sum of Three Cubes problem that puzzled mathematicians for 65 years—we’re forever crunching ...

A year ago AlphaGeometry, an artificial-intelligence (AI) problem solver created by Google DeepMind, surprised the world by performing at the level of silver medallists in the International ...

The card game Set has long inspired mathematicians to create interesting problems. Now, a technique based on large language models (LLMs) is showing that artificial intelligence (AI) can help ...

In 2019, mathematicians finally solved one of the hardest math problems—one that had stumped them for decades. It’s called a Diophantine Equation, and it’s sometimes known as the “summing of three ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The simplest ideas in mathematics can also be the most perplexing. Take addition. It’s a straightforward operation: One of the first ...