The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime ...

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 ...

What is the most bizarre real number that you can imagine? Probably many people think of an irrational number such as pi (π) or Euler’s number. And indeed, such values can be considered “wild.” After ...

An unknot (also known as the trivial knot) can be drawn with any number of crossings. Any possible manipulation of a knot ...

Mathematicians sometimes think of their research as a garden and unsolved problems as seeds waiting to sprout. Some problems are analogous to tulip bulbs. As mathematicians work to solve them, they ...