One of the first collaborations Xinyi Yuan and Wei Zhang ever undertook was a trip to the Social Security office. It was the fall of 2004 and the two of them were promising young graduate students in ...

In the third century BCE, Apollonius of Perga asked how many circles one could draw that would touch three given circles at exactly one point each. It would take 1,800 years to prove the answer: eight ...

The world belongs to the mathematicians and the physicists. We lay people may pump our minds with Discovery Channel specials, but they’re the ones who get to understand how it all really works–how the ...

The Fields Medal, the world’s highest honor for mathematical research, has gone to two mathematicians who forged new links between different branches of mathematics. The recipients–announced this week ...

“There are many different pathways into mathematics,” said Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “There is the stereotype that interest in math displays itself ...

Pine cones. Stock-market quotations. Sunflowers. Classical architecture. Reproduction of bees. Roman poetry. What do they have in common? In one way or another, these and many more creations of nature ...