athematics is, at its core, an art. Like painters, musicians or writers, mathematicians create and explore new worlds. They ...

In October 2024 Luke Durant, an independent researcher in San Jose, Calif., announced that he had discovered the largest known prime number—so enormous it would take years to write out in full. One ...

When it comes to hard problems, computer scientists seem to be stuck. Consider, for example, the notorious problem of finding the shortest round-trip route that passes through every city on a map ...