Mathematics

PBS THIRTEEN's Counting From Infinity: Yitang Zhang and the Twin Prime Conjecture chronicles a string of mathematical discoveries that began with a solution to the Twin Prime Conjecture. In 2013, Yitang Zhang, Member (2014) in the School of...

John Pardon, current Visitor in the School of Mathematics and Professor at Princeton University, has received the National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award, the nation's highest honor for early career scientists and engineers under the age...

Equiangular lines are an elemental part of geometry. . . . Mathematicians want to know just how big those sets can get as you move past the 3-D space of our everyday experience and into higher dimensions.

Last spring a team of mathematicians found...

Proving the Riemann hypothesis remains arguably the most important unsolved problem in pure mathematics—one whose solution would fetch a $1 million Millennium Prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute. Conversely, as the number theorist Enrico...

Mathematics might be more of an environmental science than we realize. Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director and Leon Levy Professor, explores the possibility of developing a new realm of mathematics in order to fully understand the quantum world. 

Gravitational waves were detected for the first time a year and a half ago, when some of them throbbed through Earth. Two incredibly sensitive detectors—one in Washington State and one in Louisiana—picked up the distortions in spacetime, emanating...

Come the middle of March, a remotely curious college-hoops observer, innocently typing “March Madness” into Google, encounters a swarm of numbers related to the N.C.A.A.’s annual basketball tournament. ... Ken Ono, Member (1995–97) in the School of...

In Quanta's Abstractions blog, top women in mathematics and physics, including Miranda Cheng, Visitor (2011) in the School of Natural Sciences, Tracy Slatyer, Member (2010–13) in the School, Maria Chudnovsky, Veblen Research Instructor (2003–05) in...

In 1847, Gabriel Lamé proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. Or so he thought. Lamé was a French mathematician who had made many important discoveries. In March of that year he sensed he’d made perhaps his biggest: an elegant proof of a problem that had...

Early on, Harvey Friedman, Visitor (1975) in the School of Mathematics, understood that discovering concrete examples of mathematical incompleteness among already-existing statements would be an arduous task. There’s the continuum hypothesis, the...