One of the oldest and simplest problems in geometry has caught mathematicians off guard—and not for the first time. Since antiquity, artists and geometers have wondered how shapes can tile the entire ...

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 ...

MILLENNIUM PRIZE SERIES: The Millennium Prize Problems are seven mathematics problems laid out by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. They’re not easy – a correct solution to any one results in a ...

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.

Monstrous moonshine, a quirky pattern of the monster group in theoretical math, has a shadow - umbral moonshine. Mathematicians have now proved this insight, known as the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture, ...

A team of mathematicians has solved a math problem first posed more than 40 years ago. It took three mathematicians almost 15 years to solve the famous Rota’s Conjecture – a theory first posed by ...

They made some progress, re-proving the conjecture in two dimensions using different techniques—ones they hoped would be applicable to the three-dimensional case. But then they hit a wall. “At some ...