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In Music and Math, Lillian Pierce Builds Landscapes
Lillian Pierce wants to transform access to the world of mathematics, while making headway on problems that bridge the discrete and continuous.
In New Math Proofs, Artificial Intelligence Plays to Win
A new computer program fashioned after artificial intelligence systems like AlphaGo has solved several open problems in combinatorics and graph theory.
Machine Learning Becomes a Mathematical Collaborator
Two recent collaborations between mathematicians and DeepMind demonstrate the potential of machine learning to help researchers generate new mathematical conjectures.
An Ancient Geometry Problem Falls to New Mathematical Techniques
Three mathematicians show, for the first time, how to form a square with the same area as a circle by cutting them into interchangeable pieces that can be visualized.
How Tadayuki Watanabe Disproved a Major Conjecture About Spheres
Watanabe invented a new way of distinguishing shapes on his way to solving the last open case of the Smale conjecture, a central question in topology about symmetries of the sphere.
New Math Book Rescues Landmark Topology Proof
Michael Freedman’s momentous 1981 proof of the four-dimensional Poincaré conjecture was on the verge of being lost. The editors of a new book are trying to save it.
Proof Assistant Makes Jump to Big-League Math
Mathematicians using the computer program Lean have verified the accuracy of a difficult theorem at the cutting edge of research mathematics.
The Year in Math and Computer Science
Even as mathematicians and computer scientists proved big results in computational complexity, number theory and geometry, computers proved themselves increasingly indispensable in mathematics.
Inside the Secret Math Society Known Simply as Nicolas Bourbaki
For almost a century, the anonymous members of Nicolas Bourbaki have written books intended as pure expressions of mathematical thought.