When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Mathematicians have solved a longstanding algebra problem, providing a general solution for ...

In a boon to algebra students everywhere, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University has devised a simpler and more efficient way to solve problems involving the quadratic equation. The new method was ...

Ah, math. Take an easy problem we all studied in our teens, scale it up by just a couple of steps, and suddenly you’re facing something that has stumped generations of the world’s best mathematicians.

Van der Waerden’s conjecture mystified mathematicians for 85 years. Its solution shows how polynomial roots relate to one another. The equation x 2 – 5 = 0 is a bit trickier. The polynomial can’t be ...