This article is from Proof Positive, our friendly math newsletter that’s delivered to your inbox every Tuesday afternoon. Sign up today and read it first. Is math to blame for bad hair days? Before I ...

This year’s Abel Prize, an annual lifetime achievement award for mathematics that is bestowed by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and was modeled on the Nobel Prize, has been given to Gerd ...

The central limit theorem started as a bar trick for 18th-century gamblers. Now scientists rely on it every day. No matter where you look, a bell curve is close by. Place a measuring cup in your ...

Five years ago, mathematicians Dawei Chen and Quentin Gendron were trying to untangle a difficult area of algebraic geometry involving differentials, elements of calculus used to measure distance ...

As artificial intelligence reshapes software development, a small startup is betting that the industry's next big bottleneck won't be writing code — it will be trusting it. "We're already there," said ...

Mathematics is often seen as perfect—consistent, complete, and immune to contradiction. But in the early 20th century, a breakthrough proved that no mathematical system can ever explain everything ...

Large language models (LLMs) have astounded the world with their capabilities, yet they remain plagued by unpredictability and hallucinations – confidently outputting incorrect information. In ...

How likely you think something is to happen depends on what you already believe about the circumstances. That is the simple concept behind Bayes' rule, an approach to calculating probabilities, first ...

In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last Theorem, a central problem in number theory that had remained open ...

Convolution is a remarkable property of the Fourier transform, often cited in the literature as the “faltung theorem”. Convolution is a remarkable property of the Fourier transform, often cited in the ...