A decade after uncovering a mysterious mathematical relationship in the physics of "jamming," Nobel laureate Giorgio Parisi ...

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, ...

What’s the secret to prompting an AI to solve math problems that have left humans stumped? Tell it to believe in itself ...

How can you have a proof without proving anything? Mathematicians found a way and, in the process, came to blows over it – ...

An effective solution to the flooding challenge must focus on innovation, and that means looking not only at where we build and its related insurance consequences, but how we build. Cities are our ...

Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, ...

Artificial intelligence is mastering the kinds of projects that have long helped to build the careers of young mathematicians. What does that mean for their future? Credit...Illustrations by Yoshi ...

Think about placing dots on a flat surface. You want as many pairs as possible to be separated by the same distance. For any amount of dots, what is the greatest possible number of pairs that can be ...

Place any number of dots on a two-dimensional plane—say, a piece of paper—and measure the distance between each pair. If you rearrange the dots, how many pairs could be positioned exactly the same ...

In mid-May, OpenAI announced that an internal AI model had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a famous problem in discrete geometry that had stumped human mathematicians for the last 80 ...

Artificial intelligence can now solve open research-level mathematics problems — not just competition questions — and the May 2026 issue of Science News documents the moment the field registered that ...

“If you are a mathematician,” one of the world’s leading mathematicians recently wrote, “you may want to make sure you are sitting down before reading further.” And you’ll definitely need to sit down ...