The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the ...

For all of the recent strides we’ve made in the math world—like a supercomputer finally solving the Sum of Three Cubes problem that puzzled mathematicians for 65 years—we’re forever crunching ...

Some math problems have been challenging us for centuries, and while brain-busters like these hard math problems may seem impossible, someone is bound to solve ’em eventually. Well, maybe. For now, ...