In the world of high-stakes mathematics, few challenges equal the pursuit of a major conjecture, which is an unproven guess that promises to unify vast areas of the discipline. For Professor ...

(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, ...

Scanning the crowd at a fancy soiree may reveal a wide array of neckties, each fastened with a highly complex mathematical object masquerading as fashion. An entire field of mathematics is devoted to ...

When Hannah Cairo was 17 years old, she disproved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a long-standing guess in the field of harmonic analysis about how waves behave on curved surfaces. The conjecture ...

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 ...

Hannah Cairo found herself stuck on a problem that wouldn’t leave her mind. It wasn’t a regular homework assignment—it was a decades-old mathematical puzzle believed to be true by leading experts in ...

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, ...