Marijn Heule turns mathematical statements into something like Sudoku puzzles, then has computers go to work on them. His proofs have been called “disgusting,” but they go beyond what any human can do ...

Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite within reach. In 2012, the mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki claimed he had solved the abc conjecture ...

The following is an extract from our Lost in Space-Time newsletter. Each month, we hand over the keyboard to a physicist or two to tell you about fascinating ideas from their corner of the universe.

Computers are extremely good with numbers, but they haven’t gotten many human mathematicians fired. Until recently, they could barely hold their own in high school-level math competitions. But now ...

In 2024, an AI entered the fray of the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Google’s AlphaProof is part of the same Alpha group that also created AlphaFold and AlphaGo. It solved problems that ...

This is an updated version of a story first published on May 5, 2024. For many high school students returning to class, it may seem like geometry and trigonometry were created by the Greeks as a form ...

A few months before the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in July, a three-person team at OpenAI made a long bet that they could use the competition’s brutally tough problems to train an ...

A Mathematician with early access to XAI Grok 4.20, found a new Bellman function for one of the problems he had been working ...

It might come as a surprise to some people that this prediction hasn’t already come to pass. Given that mathematics is a subject of logic and precision, it would seem to be perfect territory for a ...