Consider lunch. Perhaps a nice ham sandwich. A knife should neatly halve the ham and two bread slices. But what if you slip? Oops—the ham now rests folded under a ...

For four decades, a quiet boundary in pure mathematics kept a powerful theorem locked inside the safe world of finite quantities. Now a new result known as Sebestyen’s theorem has pushed that boundary ...

Cédric Villani’s new book describes the work that went into a mathematical proof of nonlinear Landau damping. If that sounds like Greek to you, have no worries. The subject of the book is not the math ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last ...

In a new peer-reviewed study, Ne'Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson outlined 10 ways to solve the Pythagorean theorem using trigonometry, including a proof they discovered in high school. When you ...

A mathematician will turn a groundbreaking 100-page proof into computer code. The proof tool, Lean, lets users turn proofs written in prose into rules and logic for testing. Kevin Buzzard already uses ...

There’s a delightful mathematical moment in the movie Merry Andrew, when Danny Kaye, playing schoolmaster Andrew Larabee, breaks into song to teach the Pythagorean theorem. I was reminded of this ...