When I tell someone I am a mathematician, one of the most curious common reactions is: “I really liked math class because everything was either right or wrong. There is no ambiguity or doubt.” I ...

Marijn Heule turns mathematical statements into something like Sudoku puzzles, then has computers go to work on them. His proofs have been called “disgusting,” but they go beyond what any human can do ...

Computers are extremely good with numbers, but they haven’t gotten many human mathematicians fired. Until recently, they could barely hold their own in high school-level math competitions. But now ...

The one source of truth is mathematics. Every statement is a pure logical deduction from foundational axioms, resulting in absolute certainty. Since Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, you’d be ...

Terence Tao, a mathematics professor at UCLA, is a real-life superintelligence. The “Mozart of Math,” as he is sometimes called, is widely considered the world’s greatest living mathematician. He has ...

Every day, dozens of like-minded mathematicians gather on an online forum called Zulip to build what they believe is the future of their field. They’re all devotees of a software program called Lean.

The starting point for rigorous reasoning in mathematics is a system of axioms. An axiom is a statement that is assumed, without demonstration, to be true. It is usually self-evident, for example, ...

Mathematics education in the United States is broken. Open any newspaper and stories of math failure shout from the pages: low international rankings, widespread innumeracy in the general population, ...