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.

How do you prove something is true? For mathematicians, the answer is simple: Start with some basic assumptions and proceed, step by step, to the conclusion. QED, proof complete. If there’s a mistake ...

Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite within reach. In 2012, the mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki claimed he had solved the abc conjecture ...

Mathematics is traditionally a solitary science. In 1986 Andrew Wiles withdrew to his study for seven years to prove Fermat’s theorem. The resulting proofs are often difficult for colleagues to ...

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 ...