An effective solution to the flooding challenge must focus on innovation, and that means looking not only at where we build ...

Think about placing dots on a flat surface. You want as many pairs as possible to be separated by the same distance. For any amount of dots, what is the greatest possible number of pairs that can be ...

Artificial intelligence is mastering the kinds of projects that have long helped to build the careers of young mathematicians. What does that mean for their future? Credit...Illustrations by Yoshi ...

A famed physicist’s scribbles reveal the answer to a quintessential dilemma: When dining out, is it better to stick with an old favorite, or try something new? Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard ...

In mid-May, OpenAI announced that an internal AI model had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a famous problem in discrete geometry that had stumped human mathematicians for the last 80 ...

Richard Feynman described a decision-making problem and its solution in handwritten notes, but the meaning of the notes has been a mystery for almost 50 y. We decipher the problem and solution from ...

Working memory is like a mental chalkboard we use to store temporary information while executing other tasks. Scientists worked with more than 200 elementary students to test their working memory, ...

Artificial intelligence can now solve open research-level mathematics problems — not just competition questions — and the May 2026 issue of Science News documents the moment the field registered that ...

“If you are a mathematician,” one of the world’s leading mathematicians recently wrote, “you may want to make sure you are sitting down before reading further.” And you’ll definitely need to sit down ...

Last week, OpenAI shocked the mathematical community by revealing that one of its internal artificial intelligence (AI) models had found a counterexample to a famous conjecture made by legendary ...

OpenAI claims its model solved a famous geometry problem that has eluded the world’s greatest mathematicians for 80 years — a breakthrough hailed as evidence of the bot’s creativity and “intuition.” ...

OpenAI claims its new reasoning model has produced an original mathematical proof disproving a famous unsolved conjecture in geometry, which was first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. If this sounds ...