The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. At the turn of the 20th century, the renowned mathematician David Hilbert had a grand ambition to bring a more rigorous, mathematical ...

As a physics major, it feels like I spend the majority of my waking life solving problems. I’ve calculated the amount of water you get from mixing different ratios of steam and ice, the path of ...

You will never be able to prove every mathematical truth. For me, this incompleteness theorem, discovered by Kurt Gödel, is one of the most incredible results in mathematics. It may not surprise ...

Numerical simulations in physics often require estimating a multitude of parameters, making the process computationally ...

A computer chip modeled after the human brain just solved the kind of math that keeps fighter jets from shaking apart in ...

A rocket launch. Our nearest stellar neighbor. A Netflix show. All of these things have something in common: They must contend with the "three-body problem." But exactly what is this thorny physics ...

At a secret meeting in 2025, some of the world's leading mathematicians gathered to test OpenAI's newest large language model, o4-mini. Experts at the meeting were amazed by how much the model's ...

Then it’s kind of a mystery to try to figure out why and how they’re related.” The Riemann hypothesis has proved to be a font of surprising connections all over math and beyond it, to the realm of the ...

Sitting in the front row of a "General Chemistry" class at McCosh last fall, tracking questions and taking notes as earnestly as any undergraduate, Ana Mostafavi was a reassuring fixture in one of the ...