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 ...

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.

For almost two centuries, mathematicians believed there was no general solution for certain high-degree polynomial equations. Now, two Australian researchers—Norman Wildberger and Dean Rubine—have ...

A research team led by Maxim Kontsevich, a professor at the French Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES) and a 1998 ...

Equations, like numbers, cannot always be split into simpler elements. Researchers have now proved that such “prime” equations become ubiquitous as equations grow larger. Prime numbers get all the ...

After German mathematician Gerd Faltings proved the Mordell conjecture in 1983, he was awarded the Fields Medal, often described as the “Nobel Prize of Mathematics.” The conjecture describes the set ...