When a gang of gambling cheats sussed out how to beat the house, they inadvertently highlighted a loophole from a shuffled deck. It took a magician-turned-mathematician to reveal how.

Far from being an abstract mathematical curiosity, knot theory has driven many findings in math and beyond.

AlphaTensor opens the door to a world where AI designs programs that outperform anything humans engineer—including AI itself.

Horizontal number lines are often the default option – but our brains may process numbers more quickly in a vertical arrangement.

A 92-year-old man could be the oldest person in Britain to ever pass a GCSE exam after receiving the highest possible grade in his maths paper. Derek Skipper, from Orwell in Cambridgeshire, sat a foundation level maths exam earlier this year, and found out on Thursday morning he had achieved a level 5 (equivalent to a lower B).

In 1963, the mathematician Roy Kerr found a solution to Einstein’s equations that precisely described the space-time outside what we now call a rotating black hole. (The term wouldn’t be coined for a few more years.) In the nearly six decades since his achievement, researchers have tried to show that these so-called Kerr black holes are stable.

The findings enhance our understanding of flight stability and could inspire new types of flying robots and small drones. “The study started with simple curiosity about what makes a good paper airplane and specifically what is needed for smooth gliding,” says Leif Ristroph, an associate professor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and an author of the study in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

The ideas behind psychohistory are more scientific than you might think.

Level of maths anxiety within same school or classroom found to predict individuals’ maths achievement

DeepMind's AI is probably best known for cracking the popular strategy game Go, but in the last few years, machine learning has proved extremely valuable in an array of applications like protein-folding and deep intuition. Now, for the first time, the technology has been used to identify mathematical connections that have eluded researchers for decades. Teaming up with mathematicians, DeepMind's AI sought to tackle two distinct problems – one in the study of symmetries and the other in knot theory.

Chaos and the Feigenbaum constant

Perelman cracks a century-old conundrum, refuses the reward, and barricades himself in his flat

The concept of a dimension seems simple enough, but mathematicians struggled for centuries to precisely define and understand it.

Most people know the value of Pi as 3.1416, but it's gotten longer and longer over the years as researchers try to find its most accurate calculation. A team from the University of Applied Sciences Graubünden in Switzerland now claims it has broken the world record for computing for the mathematical constant: It said it has calculated for 62.8 trillion digits of Pi. The current record holder, Timothy Mullican, calculated up to 50 trillion digits and was recognized for his work last year.

An Australian mathematician has discovered that Babylonians may have used applied geometry roughly 1,500 years before the Greeks supposedly invented its foundations, according to a new study published in the Foundations of Science journal this month.

The ancient Babylonians understood key concepts in geometry, including how to make precise right-angled triangles. They used this mathematical know-how to divide up farmland – more than 1000 years before the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, with whom these ideas are associated.

Old Babylonian tablet likely used for surveying uses Pythagorean triples at least 1,000 years before Pythagoras

In 1990, Marilyn vos Savant correctly answered a probability puzzle in her column for Parade Magazine. And then, the world called her an idiot.

For thousands of years, mathematicians were calculating Pi the obvious but numerically inefficient way. Then Newton came along and changed the game.

Pushing the boundaries of math requires great minds to pose fascinating problems. What if a machine could do it? Now, scientists created one that can. A good conjecture has something like a magnetic pull for the mind of a mathematician. At its best, a mathematical conjecture states something extremely profound in an extremely precise and succinct way, crying out for proof or disproof.