In 1945, as the first atomic bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert, Enrico Fermi stood miles away, holding a few scraps of paper. As the shockwave rolled toward him, he dropped the papers and watched ...

Last month, OpenAI announced that its latest version of ChatGPT had solved a major math problem, one that had stumped experts ...

Richard Feynman could turn almost anything into physics and math. Even lunch. One day in the late 1970s, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist sat in a Thai restaurant in Glendale, California, with his ...

The result is correct but challenges core norms of mathematics: checking proofs, crediting ideas and keeping research open to everyone.

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 ...

Mathematician Will Sawin discusses his experience reviewing and refining a mathematical proof devised by OpenAI's internal model—and what that could mean for mathematics. Reading time 10 minutes Will ...

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, ...

A recent announcement that an artificial intelligence model succeeded in solving a decades-old mathematical problem that had eluded generations of accomplished mathematicians was widely portrayed as ...

“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 ...