The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last ...

After the star-studded mystery thriller The Number 23 debuted in cinemas in 2007, many people became convinced that they were seeing the eponymous number everywhere. I was in school at that time, and ...

“Many people don't realize that there are math questions that we don't know how to answer,” says mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood of Harvard University and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced ...