The world may seem orderly, but randomness and chaos shape everything in the universe, from enormous galaxies all the way down to subatomic particles. Take a chilly window sheeting over with ice: even ...

(via Quanta) A simple question about a spinning needle has haunted mathematicians for more than a century. It led to the Kakeya conjecture, a cornerstone of modern analysis connecting geometry, ...

One of the biggest stories in science is quietly playing out in the world of abstract mathematics. Over the course of last year, researchers fulfilled a decades-old dream when they unveiled a proof of ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

For over a decade, a mysterious mathematical theory has perplexed mathematicians worldwide. Known as the Inter-universal Teichmüller Theory (IUT), it is so complex and hard to understand that even ...

Mathematicians have finally solved a geometry problem that has puzzled the field for decades. By wiggling a needle around while spinning it, you can minimize the amount of space it moves through, ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sometime in the fall of 2021, Andrew Krapivin, an undergraduate at Rutgers University, encountered a paper that would change his life.

When one thinks of mathematics, the thought that comes to most peoples’ heads is solving an equation and getting a correct answer. That is the case with many mathematical theorems, including one of ...

Mathematicians from New York University and the University of British Columbia have resolved a decades-old geometric problem, the Kakeya conjecture in 3D, which studies the shape left behind by a ...