In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an infinitely thin, inch-long needle on a flat surface, then rotate ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

Hannah Cairo found herself stuck on a problem that wouldn’t leave her mind. It wasn’t a regular homework assignment—it was a decades-old mathematical puzzle believed to be true by leading experts in ...

Inside the symmetries of a crystal shape, a postdoctoral researcher has unearthed a counterexample to a basic conjecture about multiplicative inverses. “I’m nearly at the end of the talk, and it’s ...

Mathematics has its share of prodigies, but rarely does someone so young alter the shape of the field before even earning their first degree. At 17, Hannah Cairo, a homeschooled teenager, has ...