Jack Murtagh is a freelance math writer and puzzle creator. He writes a column on mathematical curiosities for Scientific ...

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 ...

Social Security’s finances may be in worse shape than thought. The Social Security Trustees — who release a report each year on the health of the program that supports about 70 million retirees and ...

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 ...

Last week, OpenAI shocked the mathematical community by revealing that one of its internal artificial intelligence (AI) models had found a counterexample to a famous conjecture made by legendary ...

Is America heading toward a national debt crisis? As an economic adviser to President Biden and an economist active in mainly Democratic policy circles since the late 1980s, I’ve spent most of my ...