Obscure, generations-old theorems have been transformative in tech, and there are still plenty out there to be used.

All the Covid indicators in the UK are going in the wrong direction. They have been for a while now. Cases are surging upwards; hospitals are feeling the strain of increasing numbers of Covid patients, and daily death tolls are rising. At _...Read More_

A number theorist recalls his first encounter with the Riemann hypothesis and breaks down the math in a new Quanta video.

Imagine if we lived on a cube-shaped Earth. How would you find the shortest path around the world?

Long considered solved, David Hilbert’s question about seventh-degree polynomials is leading researchers to a new web of mathematical connections.

Today’s information age is only possible thanks to the groundbreaking work of a lone genius.

"Three physicists stumbled across an unexpected relationship between some of the most ubiquitous objects in math."

So, a permutation is a special arrangement of symbols. A “superpermutation,” in a sense, is a special arrangement of permutations: It is a sequence of symbols that contains every possible permutation of those symbols. For example, stringing _...Read More_

“The future doesn’t just happen. We are building it, and we are building it all the time.”

"Neural networks can be as unpredictable as they are powerful. Now mathematicians are beginning to reveal how a neural network’s form will influence its function"

"A little high school geometry can help you understand the basic math behind movie recommendation engines."

I remember reading these papers when they were first widely available. I am no great mathematician (and certainly not adequate to adjudicate the controversy in Corollary 3.12), but I remember having a sense of how the proof might work. _...Read More_

"Digital security depends on the difficulty of factoring large numbers. A new proof shows why one method for breaking digital encryption won’t work."

"A founder of modern geometric analysis who produced “some of the most dramatic advances in mathematics in the last 40 years,” Uhlenbeck is the first woman to be"