In May 2026, OpenAI released a new math result that sent shock waves throughout the world of mathematical research. A major unsolved problem called the "unit distance conjecture" had just been ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 2003, a German graduate student named Britta Späth encountered the McKay conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in the ...

The quest to make mathematics rigorous has a long and spotty history — one mathematicians can learn from as they push to formalize everything in the computer program Lean. In ancient Greece, Euclid ...

In October 2024 I attended a workshop at Harvard University where mathematicians talked through the uses of artificial intelligence in their field. Most were less worried about the future of math than ...

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, ...

Jenny Quinn, executive director of the Seattle Universal Math Museum, shows off a solved Fibonacci sequence puzzle. (GeekWire Photo / Maddie Stoll) Jenny Quinn travels with math in her backpack. She ...

In May 2026, OpenAI released a new math result that sent shock waves throughout the world of mathematical research. A major unsolved problem called the “unit distance conjecture” had just been ...