For years, physicists were stuck in trying to explain an important mathematical problem in physics. The right approach ended ...

Dylan Kane likes his math curriculum. But there’s one important piece missing, he says. The 7th grade math teacher in Leadville, Colo., uses a program that teaches math skills through real-world ...

An effective solution to the flooding challenge must focus on innovation, and that means looking not only at where we build ...

Last month, OpenAI announced that its latest version of ChatGPT had solved a major math problem, one that had stumped experts ...

Think about placing dots on a flat surface. You want as many pairs as possible to be separated by the same distance. For any amount of dots, what is the greatest possible number of pairs that can be ...

In mid-May, OpenAI announced that an internal AI model had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a famous problem in discrete geometry that had stumped human mathematicians for the last 80 ...

Working memory is like a mental chalkboard we use to store temporary information while executing other tasks. Scientists worked with more than 200 elementary students to test their working memory, ...

“If you are a mathematician,” one of the world’s leading mathematicians recently wrote, “you may want to make sure you are sitting down before reading further.” And you’ll definitely need to sit down ...

Artificial intelligence can now solve open research-level mathematics problems — not just competition questions — and the May 2026 issue of Science News documents the moment the field registered that ...

AI can rifle through enormous libraries of information to connect far-flung ideas—conceptual leaps remain a purely human skill. The planar unit distance problem, or Erdős problem 90, has intrigued ...

OpenAI claims its model solved a famous geometry problem that has eluded the world’s greatest mathematicians for 80 years — a breakthrough hailed as evidence of the bot’s creativity and “intuition.” ...