The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Standing in the middle of a field, we can easily forget that we live on a round planet. We’re so small in comparison to the Earth that ...

This path forms the basis of the new impossible shape, which is a continuous multilevel staircase modeled on a shape called a ...

Sometimes work in one discipline of pure mathematics has a completely unexpected payoff in another. Some of the famous mathematician Pierre de Fermat’s (1601–1665) work in number theory bears this out ...

Mathematics continues to evolve rapidly and shapes everything from artificial intelligence to climate modelling. Many modern mathematicians have gained global recognition for expanding theoretical ...

Mathematicians explore ideas by proposing conjectures and proving them with theorems. For centuries, they built these proofs line by careful line, and most math researchers still work like that today.

In 1900, mathematician David Hilbert presented his colleagues with a list of problems he believed both captured the present state of mathematics and the shape of its future. This year, 125 years later ...

Mathematicians like to generalize concepts into higher dimensions. Sometimes this is easy. If you want to efficiently pack squares in two dimensions, you arrange them like a checkerboard. To squeeze ...

Stream now with KPBS Passport on KPBS+ / Watch Monday, Feb. 16 and Feb. 17 at 11 p.m. on KPBS TV JOURNEYS OF BLACK MATHEMATICIANS is a two-part series that traces the cultural evolution of Black ...

A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime numbers. The primes — numbers that are only divisible by themselves ...