On June 23, 1993, the mathematician Andrew Wiles gave the last of three lectures detailing his solution to Fermat’s last theorem, a problem that had remained unsolved for three and a half centuries.
Infinite Series is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and ...
Mathematics is distinguished from the sciences by the freedom it enjoys in choosing basic assumptions from which consequences can be deduced by applying the laws of logic. We call the basic ...
“You don’t have to believe in God, but you have to believe in The Book,” the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős once said. The Book, which only exists in theory, contains the most elegant proofs of ...
Here's a scene from "The Royale," an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that aired March 27, 1989. In it, Captain Jean-Luc Picard tells his First Officer, Commander Riker, about his work in ...
AI could soon spew out hundreds of mathematical proofs that look "right" but contain hidden flaws, or proofs so complex we ...
Herbert Simon, the Nobel-prize winning economist, was a techno-enthusiast. In 1956 he predicted that, “within 10 years, computers would beat the world chess champion, compose ‘aesthetically satisfying ...
DeepSeek has released DeepSeek-Prover-V2, a new open-source large language model specifically designed for formal theorem proving in Lean 4. The model builds on a recursive theorem proving pipeline ...
During my time as an eager undergraduate mathematician, I’d often wonder what it would feel like to prove a truly new result and have my name immortalised in the mathematical history books. I thought ...