In October 2024 Luke Durant, an independent researcher in San Jose, Calif., announced that he had discovered the largest known prime number—so enormous it would take years to write out in full. One ...

When it comes to hard problems, computer scientists seem to be stuck. Consider, for example, the notorious problem of finding the shortest round-trip route that passes through every city on a map ...

Mathematics is one of the oldest disciplines of study. For all its antiquity, however, it is a modern, rapidly growing field. Only 70 years ago, mathematics might have been said to consist of algebra, ...

Baltimore — Imagine you’re a character in a math problem. You have three platters, but two cakes. All three platters need to have the same amount of cake. How would you split it? Without even saying ...

A defining memory from my senior year of high school was a nine-hour math exam with just six questions. Six of the top scorers won slots on the U.S. team for the International Math Olympiad (IMO), the ...

A star student at her small Alabama high school, Kyra Richardson graduated confident in her academic prowess in all but one subject: math. By the time she arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2024, it ...

It’s an old joke that there are three kinds of people in the world: those who are good at math and those who aren’t. Tanya Evans, an associate professor in the School of Education and Human ...

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links. Generally, a 100-watt-equivalent LED light bulb is between 10 and 15 watts. 60-watt-equivalent LED bulbs are between 8 and 10 watts, and ...

America’s amazing technological achievements, such as SpaceX’s recent rescue of stranded astronauts, mask the death spiral of math learning in the U.S., which has reached an ignominious low with ...

A dad in Virginia ended up turning to social media for help after becoming confused by a first-grade math problem. Math seems to be a problem for many young Americans. In 2022, the Programme for ...

Harvard might be America’s most elite university — but now it’s offering remedial math classes. The school’s math department is providing a new scaled-back math class for freshmen who are apparently ...