Last week, Yitang “Tom” Zhang, a popular math professor at the University of New Hampshire, stunned the world of pure mathematics when he announced that he had proven the “bounded gaps” conjecture ...

On its surface, the Kakeya conjecture is a simple statement about rotating needles. But it underlies a wealth of mathematics. In mathematics, a simple problem is often not what it seems. Earlier this ...

Inside the symmetries of a crystal shape, a postdoctoral researcher has unearthed a counterexample to a basic conjecture about multiplicative inverses. “I’m nearly at the end of the talk, and it’s ...