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 ...

Since the start of the 20th century, the heart of mathematics has been the proof — a rigorous, logical argument for whether a given statement is true or false. Mathematicians’ careers are measured by ...

Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite within reach. In 2012, the mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki claimed he had solved the abc conjecture ...

It all started with an innocuous TikTok video posted by a high school student named Gracie Cunningham. Applying make-up while speaking into the camera, the teenager questioned whether math is “real.” ...

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 ...

Nearly twenty years after I graduated high school and my last calculus class, I still get that nightmare where I’m at the exam for a calculus course I somehow forgot to attend, or that I faked my way ...

Talia Ringer is in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, 61801, USA. Read the paper: Olympiad-level formal mathematical ...