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Artificial intelligence is mastering the kinds of projects that have long helped to build the careers of young mathematicians. What does that mean for their future? Credit...Illustrations by Yoshi ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...

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.” ...

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Every year, the countries competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad arrive with a booklet of their best, most original problems. Those booklets get shared among delegations, then quietly ...

Axiom Math is giving away a powerful new AI tool. But it remains to be seen if it speeds up research as much as the company hopes. Axiom Math, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, has released a ...

Some readers may solve the problem procedurally: line up the two numbers, add the ones column, carry the one, and add the tens to get 43. Others might instead notice a creative shortcut: 29 + 14 is ...

Some kids struggle with math. Now, scientists have pinpointed some of the specific thinking processes and brain regions that might explain why math is a little harder for some than others. When given ...