If pure math can teach us anything, it’s this: occasionally, your special interest might just change the world. For Joshua Zahl and Hong Wang, that special interest was the Kakeya conjecture. “I read ...

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 ...

Arithmetic geometry is a vibrant field at the intersection of number theory and algebraic geometry, focussing on the study of polynomial equations and the distribution of their rational solutions.

Consider a pencil lying on your desk. Try to spin it around so that it points once in every direction, but make sure it sweeps over as little of the desk’s surface as possible. You might twirl the ...

Mathematicians thought they were on the cusp of proving a conjecture about the ancient structures known as Apollonian circles. But a summer project would lead to its downfall. Summer Haag and Clyde ...

Despite multiple conferences dedicated to explicating Mochizuki’s proof, number theorists have struggled to come to grips with its underlying ideas. His series of papers, which total more than 500 ...

The Poincaré conjecture can be understood by analogy with the case in two dimensions. A two-dimensional space, or surface, is like a bubble made from an infinitely thin film of soap. If the bubble is ...