Many students appear to be completing assignments faster while learning less from them. This conclusion comes from one of the largest studies of how generative AI is changing student behavior and ...

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 ...

Animal psychologists have found that giraffes can mentally combine small sums of objects, but can't perform the subtractive equivalent.

In the mid-noughties, when music by the Killers and Franz Ferdinand blared out of every pub and nightclub I passed, I spent my days and nights struggling through a Ph. D.

This month, 30 mathematicians gathered at Harvard University to grade a consequential and difficult problem set. This wasn’t just any test; its outcome would guide a field grappling with existential ...

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 ...

Working memory is like a mental chalkboard we use to store temporary information while executing other tasks. Scientists worked with more than 200 elementary students to test their working memory, ...

“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 ...