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He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal.
June Huh wasn’t interested in mathematics until a chance encounter during his sixth year of college. Now his profound insights connecting combinatorics and geometry have led to math’s highest honor.
In Times of Scarcity, War and Peace, a Ukrainian Finds the Magic in Math
With her homeland mired in war, the sphere-packing number theorist Maryna Viazovska has become the second woman to win a Fields Medal in the award’s 86-year history.
The Sordid Past of the Cubic Formula
The quest to solve cubic equations led to duels, betrayals — and modern mathematics.
Special Surfaces Remain Distinct in Four Dimensions
For decades mathematicians have searched for a specific pair of surfaces that can’t be transformed into each other in four-dimensional space. Now they’ve found them.
Unimaginable Surfaces Discovered After Decades-Long Search
Using ideas borrowed from graph theory, two mathematicians have shown that extremely complex surfaces are easy to traverse.
Father-Son Team Solves Geometry Problem With Infinite Folds
The result could help researchers answer a larger question about flattening objects from the fourth dimension to the third dimension.
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.
Why Triangles Are Easy and Tetrahedra Are Hard
The triangle angle sum theorem makes working with triangles easy. What happens when you can’t rely on it?
The Year in Math and Computer Science
Mathematicians and computer scientists answered major questions in topology, set theory and even physics, even as computers continued to grow more capable.