Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is so widely accepted that modern mathematicians hardly think about it. But believing in its core ...

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.

GPT-5.4 Pro cracked a conjecture in number theory that had stumped generations of mathematicians, using a proof strategy that no human had ever considered.

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 ...