The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in ...

For four decades, a quiet boundary in pure mathematics kept a powerful theorem locked inside the safe world of finite quantities. Now a new result known as Sebestyen’s theorem has pushed that boundary ...

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(THE REPORTER) — Now that everyone has mini-supercomputers that pretend to be phones in their pockets, it can be challenging to get young people to learn problem-solving skills that do not involve ...

At the University of Vaasa in Finland, mathematician Yosra Barkaoui has successfully generalized a fundamental theorem that had remained confined to “bounded” systems for more than 40 years.

It’s a complaint many algebra teachers are familiar with, as more letters and symbols are introduced with progressively harder courses in mathematics. But why did the plus symbol emerge as the ...