One of the oldest and simplest problems in geometry has caught mathematicians off guard—and not for the first time. Since antiquity, artists and geometers have wondered how shapes can tile the entire ...

Arithmetic geometry is a vibrant field at the intersection of number theory and algebraic geometry, focussing on the study of polynomial equations and the distribution of their rational solutions.

After German mathematician Gerd Faltings proved the Mordell conjecture in 1983, he was awarded the Fields Medal, often described as the “Nobel Prize of Mathematics.” The conjecture describes the set ...

Caroline Klivans, senior lecturer in applied mathematics and computer science, achieved every student’s dream and proved her former advisor wrong. The Partitionability Conjecture was postulated by ...

Two mathematicians have proved that a straightforward question — how hard is it to untie a knot? — has a complicated answer.

Hannah Cairo found herself stuck on a problem that wouldn’t leave her mind. It wasn’t a regular homework assignment—it was a decades-old mathematical puzzle believed to be true by leading experts in ...

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 ...

A Rochester Institute of Technology doctoral student was part of a team of researchers that settled a 90-year-old math problem called Keller’s conjecture. David Narváez, who studies computing and ...

Has one of the major outstanding problems in number theory finally been solved? Or is the 600-page proof missing a key piece? The verdict isn’t in yet, but the proof, at least, will finally appear in ...

They made some progress, re-proving the conjecture in two dimensions using different techniques—ones they hoped would be applicable to the three-dimensional case. But then they hit a wall. “At some ...