Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

A simple question about a spinning needle has haunted mathematicians for more than a century. It led to the Kakeya conjecture ...

Fermat’s last theorem is just one of many examples of innocent-looking problems that can long stymie even the most astute mathematicians. It took about 350 years to prove Fermat’s scribbled conjecture ...

Nearly 40 years after it was proposed, mathematicians have settled one of the most profound questions in the study of general relativity. In a paper posted online last fall, mathematicians Mihalis ...

It’s an educated guess, not a proof. But a good conjecture will guide math forward, pointing the way into the mathematical unknown. Mountain climbing is a beloved metaphor for mathematical research.

For close to 40 years, a simple little hypothesis has been quietly sitting in a corner of graph theory, minding its own business. Known as the “bunkbed conjecture”, it always seemed kind of ...