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, ...

How do bees make group decisions without a leader? Math experts have determined that the best strategy is for a few to assume ...

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

On 20th May, OpenAI announced that one of their models, not yet available to the public, had autonomously solved the unit distance problem: an 80-year-old problem in combinatorial geometry. Sir ...

Last week, OpenAI shocked the mathematical community by revealing that one of its internal artificial intelligence (AI) models had found a counterexample to a famous conjecture made by legendary ...

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 ...

For nearly 80 years, a famous problem in discrete geometry had challenged mathematicians. All it took was a prompt from an internal OpenAI model to disprove a conjecture made by the late Hungarian ...

I have a confession that probably won't surprise anyone who knows me well: I love reading books about mathematicians. Not because I understand the dense mathematics. I struggled through four semesters ...

Place a handful of dots on a sheet of paper and measure the distances between them. Rearrange the dots — how many pairs can you get sitting exactly the same distance apart? Simple enough to sketch on ...