You enter a cave. At the end of a dark corridor, you encounter a pair of sealed chambers. Inside each chamber is an all-knowing wizard. The prophecy says that with these oracles’ help, you can learn ...

Mathematician Kevin Buzzard of Imperial College London is training computers how to prove one of the most famous problems in math history: Fermat’s last theorem. Resolving the problem isn’t the point.

Discrete mathematics gets easier when you know how to approach proofs. Direct reasoning, induction, and contradiction each have specific steps that can be learned and practiced. Pairing these methods ...

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. In 1997, Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by IBM, did the unexpected: it defeated chess ...

A mathematician will turn a groundbreaking 100-page proof into computer code. The proof tool, Lean, lets users turn proofs written in prose into rules and logic for testing. Kevin Buzzard already uses ...

Computers are extremely good with numbers, but they haven’t gotten many human mathematicians fired. Until recently, they could barely hold their own in high school-level math competitions. But now ...

Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite within reach. In 2012, the mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki claimed he had solved the abc conjecture ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Dr. Lance B. Eliot is a world-renowned AI scientist and consultant. In today’s column, I examine an insightful AI research study ...

The verdict, it seems, is in: artificial intelligence is not about to replace mathematicians. That is the immediate takeaway from the “First Proof” challenge—perhaps the most robust test yet of the ...