One of the most controversial debates in mathematics could be settled with the aid of a computer, potentially ending a bitter argument about a complex proof that has raged for more than a decade. The ...

Section 1. Purpose and Policy. From the founding of our Republic, English has been used as our national language. Our Nation’s historic governing documents, including the Declaration of Independence ...

(via Quanta) A simple question about a spinning needle has haunted mathematicians for more than a century. It led to the Kakeya conjecture, a cornerstone of modern analysis connecting geometry, ...

When Hannah Cairo was 17 years old, she disproved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a long-standing guess in the field of harmonic analysis about how waves behave on curved surfaces. The conjecture ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: The Busy Beaver number, or BB(n), represents a ...

ABSTRACT: We prove that the Collatz, 3n+1 , conjecture is true. To prove this statement, we will first see that, if a number n starts a sequence that satisfies the Collatz conjecture then all ...

Recently, Schechter Long Island senior Amit Nitzan, junior Ariel Nitzan and junior Mikey Benlevi won awards from the Long Island Math Fair. The Long Island Math Fair is a mathematical research ...

1 The Official College of Telecommunications Engineers, Madrid, Spain. 2 Independent Researcher, Majadahonda, Spain. A reduced conjecture, equivalent to the Collatz conjecture, has been proposed; see ...

Mathematicians have finally solved a geometry problem that has puzzled the field for decades. By wiggling a needle around while spinning it, you can minimize the amount of space it moves through, ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sometime in the fall of 2021, Andrew Krapivin, an undergraduate at Rutgers University, encountered a paper that would change his life.

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 ...