On his way to winning a Fields Medal, James Maynard has cut a path through simple-sounding questions about prime numbers that have stumped mathematicians for centuries. Number theorists, however, ...

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For all of the recent strides we’ve made in the math world—like a supercomputer finally solving the Sum of Three Cubes problem that puzzled mathematicians for 65 years—we’re forever crunching ...

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, ...

A mathematician who went from obscurity to luminary status in 2013 for cracking a century-old question about prime numbers now claims to have solved another. The problem is similar to—but distinct ...

In new research, mathematicians have narrowed down one of the biggest outstanding problems in math. Huge breakthroughs in math and science are usually the work of many people over many years. Seven ...

“We’ve been stuck and running out of ideas on the problem for a long time, so it’s automatically exciting when anyone comes up with new insights,” said James Maynard, a mathematician at the University ...

An institution has offered a $1 million prize to anyone who can solve a famous math problem that has puzzled mathematicians for more than a century. The Riemann hypothesis, first proposed by German ...

The recent spate of popular books on the Riemann hypothesis, which concerns the distribution of prime numbers and is the greatest unsolved math problem since Andrew Wiles solved Fermat's famous last ...

For millennia, mathematicians have wondered whether odd perfect numbers exist, establishing an extraordinary list of restrictions for the hypothetical objects in the process. Insight on this question ...