Since the start of the 20th century, the heart of mathematics has been the proof — a rigorous, logical argument for whether a given statement is true or false. Mathematicians’ careers are measured by ...

Mathematician Kevin Buzzard of Imperial College London is training computers how to prove one of the most famous problems in math history: Fermat’s last theorem. Resolving the problem isn’t the point.

What happens when things combine? This question lies at the heart of the Borell-Brascamp-Lieb inequality (BBL), a mathematical relation widely applied across many fields of mathematics, science and ...

A mathematical proof has finally debunked the idea that we live in a simulation, according to a group of international researchers. The theory that the universe could be a computer programme has been ...

When checking that solutions to certain problems are correct, it turns out, you can’t get around the inherent complexity of ...

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 ...

The Langlands program has inspired and befuddled mathematicians for more than 50 years. A major advance has now opened up new worlds for them to explore One of the biggest stories in science has been ...

Artificial intelligence can now solve open research-level mathematics problems — not just competition questions — and the May 2026 issue of Science News documents the moment the field registered that ...

Ananyo Bhattacharya is chief science writer at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences and the author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann. One of the biggest ...