What makes a proof stronger than a guess? What does evidence look like in the realm of mathematical abstraction? Hear the mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood explain how probability helps to guide ...

In the 1970s, the late mathematician Paul Cohen, the only person to ever win a Fields Medal for work in mathematical logic, reportedly made a sweeping prediction that continues to excite and irritate ...

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. In 1997, Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by IBM, did the unexpected: it defeated chess ...

Computers are extremely good with numbers, but they haven’t gotten many human mathematicians fired. Until recently, they could barely hold their own in high school-level math competitions. But now ...

Math students may not blink at calculating probabilities, measuring the area beneath curves or evaluating matrices, yet they often find themselves at sea when first confronted with writing proofs.

Every day, dozens of like-minded mathematicians gather on an online forum called Zulip to build what they believe is the future of their field. They’re all devotees of a software program called Lean.

A mathematician will turn a groundbreaking 100-page proof into computer code. The proof tool, Lean, lets users turn proofs written in prose into rules and logic for testing. Kevin Buzzard already uses ...

A few months before the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in July, a three-person team at OpenAI made a long bet that they could use the competition’s brutally tough problems to train an ...