A simple question about a spinning needle has haunted mathematicians for more than a century. It led to the Kakeya conjecture ...

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 ...

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 ...

Bill Whitaker is an award-winning journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent who has covered major news stories, domestically and across the globe, for more than four decades with CBS News. A high school ...

(Phys.org)—A group of mathematicians specializing in arithmetic geometry met for five days earlier this month in an attempt to understand a proof constructed by Shinichi Mochizuki, of Kyoto University ...

Despite multiple conferences dedicated to explicating Mochizuki’s proof, number theorists have struggled to come to grips with its underlying ideas. His series of papers, which total more than 500 ...

The Pythagorean theorem stands as one of mathematics' most enduring and practical principles. Named after the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras, this fundamental concept has guided engineers, ...

When two mathematicians raised pointed questions about a classic proof that no one really understood, they ignited a years-long debate about how much could be trusted in a new kind of geometry. In the ...