The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an ...

In work that has been 30 years in the making, mathematicians have proved a major part of a profound mathematical vision called the Langlands program. A group of nine mathematicians has proved the ...

Fefferman’s proof—along with subsequently discovered connections to number theory, combinatorics, and other areas—revived interest in the Kakeya problem among top mathematicians. In 1995, Thomas Wolff ...

Mathematicians have proved a key building block of the Langlands programme, sometimes referred to as a “grand unified theory” of maths due to the deep links it proposes between seemingly distant ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Two mathematicians now say they’ve made progress on a very old unsolved math problem. The problem ...