Every year, the countries competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad arrive with a booklet of their best, most ...

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. In 1997, Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by IBM, did the unexpected: it defeated chess ...

The Wall Street titan Leon Black paid Jeffrey Epstein $170 million for what he said was tax and estate work. But his services went beyond that. Credit...Illustration by Anna Kliewer; source images by ...

However, people must first realize there’s a problem and understand how technology can solve it before AI can make a meaningful difference. When things click, it’s always a matter of consumer ...

When a startup struggles, founders usually assume the solution is obvious: more marketing, more hiring, or more capital. But in my experience advising founders, the real issue is usually something ...

Fermat’s Last Theorem is one of the most famous problems in mathematical history. Proposed in the 17th century, it claimed that certain equations have no solutions in whole numbers. For centuries, ...

Some readers may solve the problem procedurally: line up the two numbers, add the ones column, carry the one, and add the tens to get 43. Others might instead notice a creative shortcut: 29 + 14 is ...

When solving a puzzle, the answer could lie in your dreams. In a study of lucid dreamers, playing soundtracks linked with unsolved puzzles helped the sleepers solve the problems the next day, ...

In a dark room, in the middle of the night, a woman lies dreaming. Suddenly, her eyes beneath their lids dart crisply left-right, left-right. The eye signal means she knows she’s dreaming. Lucid ...

AI could soon spew out hundreds of mathematical proofs that look "right" but contain hidden flaws, or proofs so complex we can't verify them. How will we know if they're right? When you purchase ...