The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last ...

After the star-studded mystery thriller The Number 23 debuted in cinemas in 2007, many people became convinced that they were seeing the eponymous number everywhere. I was in school at that time, and ...

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, ...

“Many people don't realize that there are math questions that we don't know how to answer,” says mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood of Harvard University and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced ...

A new breakthrough that bridges number theory and geometry is just the latest triumph for a close-knit group of mathematicians. One of the first collaborations Xinyi Yuan and Wei Zhang ever undertook ...

Given that humans have been studying numbers for thousands of years, you might think we know everything about the number 3. But mathematicians recently discovered something new about 3: a third way to ...