42+ min ago   (1320+ words) Ada Zejun Shen for Quanta Magazine So, how evenly can you assemble the teams so that they have matching firepower in every category, from Greek mythology to college basketball? You can always make the teams surprisingly even, according to researchers…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago   (1532+ words) Ada Zejun Shen/Quanta Magazine At the quantum scale, tiny particles behave in bizarre ways. One reason for this is the uncertainty principle, which says that the more you know about where a quantum particle is, the less you can…...

2+ week, 4+ day ago   (1134+ words) On May 20, 2026, OpenAI made an announcement that shook the mathematical world. An internal AI model — one not available to the public — had come up with a counterexample to the “unit distance” problem, a conjecture made in 1946 by Paul Erdős, the…...

8+ mon, 1+ day ago   (271+ words) When Hannah Cairo was a 17-year-old high school student, she did something mathematicians had been unable to do for four decades: she overturned the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a famous prediction about how wave energy behaves. In this video, Cairo and the…...

4+ week, 1+ day ago   (1113+ words) Hong Wang, pictured here working on a new article at the Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES) in France, is just the third woman to receive a Fields Medal in the award’s 90-year history. No error was found, the proof’s…...

4+ week, 1+ day ago   (1563+ words) John Pardon is known to his colleagues and students as quiet but insightful. As one formerstudent put it, “You really have to go fishing for his knowledge.” Several eminent mathematicians tell different versions of the same story about John Pardon....

4+ week, 1+ day ago   (1807+ words) From an early age, Jacob Tsimerman showed great mathematical promise. “My mom told me, ‘You don’t have to be a mathematician just because you’re good at it,’” he said. “I didn’t really take her seriously.” Jacob Tsimerman knows that many…...

4+ week, 1+ day ago   (1865+ words) Yu Deng faced waves of uncertainty and doubt before attempting the work that would earn him a Fields Medal. Freedom and restraint seem like opposing forces, but to Yu Deng, they go hand in hand. “People thought this was, I…...

1+ mon, 3+ week ago   (1591+ words) Erdős’ approach, known as the probabilistic method, was simple but revolutionary. Before its development, “if I’m telling you that certain objects exist, you would tell me, ‘Show me,’” said Benny Sudakov, a mathematician at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology…...

1+ mon, 3+ week ago   (1911+ words) Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn or your favorite podcasting app, or you can stream it from Quanta. Note: Since this conversation was recorded, results from the First Proof Second Batch project were released on June 10, 2026. STEVE STROGATZ: All right....