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 ...

What makes a proof stronger than a guess? What does evidence look like in the realm of mathematical abstraction? Hear the mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood explain how probability helps to guide ...

Discrete mathematics is about precision in reasoning as much as it is about solving problems. Proof techniques like induction, contradiction, and direct reasoning are used to establish results in ...

Recently, two American high school students made headlines for discovering a new proof of the Pythagorean theorem. Calcea Johnson and Ne'Kiya Jackson, seniors at St. Mary's Academy in New Orleans, ...

In an attempt to attract more freshmen to theoretical mathematics, the math department expanded its offerings this school year. Last fall, it introduced the MATH 60 “Modern Mathematics: Discrete ...

Some scientific discoveries matter because they reveal something new — the double helical structure of DNA, for example, or the existence of black holes. However, some revelations are profound because ...

Remember that math problem from 2014? A Chinese AI tool cracked it ...

Got a terabyte external hard drive at home? Great. Now go buy 199 more and you'll be able to store all the data that was required to make this math proof. Nature reports on a new paper in arXiv ...