For years, physicists were stuck in trying to explain an important mathematical problem in physics. The right approach ended ...

Dylan Kane likes his math curriculum. But there’s one important piece missing, he says. The 7th grade math teacher in Leadville, Colo., uses a program that teaches math skills through real-world ...

An effective solution to the flooding challenge must focus on innovation, and that means looking not only at where we build ...

Think about placing dots on a flat surface. You want as many pairs as possible to be separated by the same distance. For any amount of dots, what is the greatest possible number of pairs that can be ...

Artificial intelligence is mastering the kinds of projects that have long helped to build the careers of young mathematicians. What does that mean for their future? Credit...Illustrations by Yoshi ...

Place any number of dots on a two-dimensional plane—say, a piece of paper—and measure the distance between each pair. If you rearrange the dots, how many pairs could be positioned exactly the same ...

In mid-May, OpenAI announced that an internal AI model had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a famous problem in discrete geometry that had stumped human mathematicians for the last 80 ...

“If you are a mathematician,” one of the world’s leading mathematicians recently wrote, “you may want to make sure you are sitting down before reading further.” And you’ll definitely need to sit down ...

Artificial intelligence can now solve open research-level mathematics problems — not just competition questions — and the May 2026 issue of Science News documents the moment the field registered that ...

AI can rifle through enormous libraries of information to connect far-flung ideas—conceptual leaps remain a purely human skill. The planar unit distance problem, or Erdős problem 90, has intrigued ...

OpenAI claims its new reasoning model has produced an original mathematical proof disproving a famous unsolved conjecture in geometry, which was first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. If this sounds ...

Goldbach’s conjecture sounds almost too simple: every even number greater than two should be the sum of two primes. Mathematicians have chased it for nearly 300 years, a publisher once offered $1 ...