After an eight-year struggle, embattled Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki has finally received some validation. His 600-page proof of the abc conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in ...

On his way to winning a Fields Medal, James Maynard has cut a path through simple-sounding questions about prime numbers that have stumped mathematicians for centuries. Number theorists, however, ...

“He proved a theorem about Carmichael numbers in a way that other mathematicians hadn't. It's a truly wonderful piece of work.” Daniel Larsen, a freshman at MIT, is making headlines for solving a ...

One of the first collaborations Xinyi Yuan and Wei Zhang ever undertook was a trip to the Social Security office. It was the fall of 2004 and the two of them were promising young graduate students in ...

Imagine you're walking down a path, minding your own business, when suddenly you find yourself trapped in a net thrown on you by an evil troll. He poses a challenge to you: he will give you a sequence ...

After the star-studded mystery thriller The Number 23 debuted in cinemas in 2007, many people became convinced that they were seeing the eponymous number everywhere. I was in school at that time, and ...