Take an outline map of the lower 48 U.S. states and four crayons. Can you shade in the map so that every state is a different color than each of its neighbors, without resorting to a fifth color? This ...

A Russian mathematician may have finally cracked one of the most famous problems in mathematics: the Poincaré conjecture, a question about the shapes of three-dimensional spaces. If his work is ...

The first proof that many people ever learn, early in high school, is the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid’s proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers. It takes just a few lines and uses no ...

Recently, two American high school students made headlines for discovering a new proof of the Pythagorean theorem. Calcea Johnson and Ne'Kiya Jackson, seniors at St. Mary's Academy in New Orleans, ...

For ages, countless mathematicians have advanced mathematics through proofs. This is because proof is a key tool for developing new theories and solving problems. That’s why a discussion about proofs ...

Infinity down, only 69,999,997 to go. New research has proven that prime numbers don't just disappear as numbers get larger — instead, there is an infinite number of prime numbers separated by a ...

Nobel Laureate John Nash GS '50 sat in the fifth row of Taplin Auditorium yesterday afternoon. Andrew Wiles, the man who proved Fermat's Last Theorem 10 years ago, sat two rows closer. All told, more ...

The one source of truth is mathematics. Every statement is a pure logical deduction from foundational axioms, resulting in absolute certainty. Since Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, you’d be ...

As he was brushing his teeth on the morning of July 17, 2014, Thomas Royen, a little-known retired German statistician, suddenly lit upon the proof of a famous conjecture at the intersection of ...

Dan Spielman, a Yale computer scientist, wasn’t looking for a new problem. He was already deeply immersed in a tricky effort to model complex online communities like Facebook, hoping to gain insight ...