In] any piece of beautiful mathematics, you almost always find that there is a physical system which actually mirrors the ...

Number theory, the study of the properties of positive integers, is perhaps the purest form of mathematics. At first sight, it may seem far too abstract to apply to the natural world. In fact, the ...

Melanie Matchett Wood is a professor of mathematics at Harvard University and a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In October, she was awarded the MacArthur ...

It’s not often that a mathematics textbook is described as “gorgeous” or “a work of practical art.” But An Illustrated Theory of Numbers by Martin Weissman, associate professor of mathematics at UC ...

Number theory is the branch of mathematics that deals with the properties of whole numbers. Many number theorists are motivated purely by mathematical intrigue, and historically number theory had few ...

After an eight-year struggle, embattled Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki has finally received some validation. His 600-page proof of the abc conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in ...

On his way to winning a Fields Medal, James Maynard has cut a path through simple-sounding questions about prime numbers that have stumped mathematicians for centuries. Number theorists, however, ...

The search for artistic truth and beauty has led Manjul Bhargava to some of the most profound recent discoveries in number theory. For Manjul Bhargava, the counting numbers don’t simply line ...