For a long time, the Kakeya conjecture, which involves rotating an infinitely narrow needle, kept mathematicians ...

The McKay conjecture is another example of this principle. It says that if you want to formulate a thorough description of a group—an important mathematical entity that can get prohibitively ...

The Kakeya set—named for its discoverer Sōichi Kakeya—was complicated by a subsequent mathematician named Abram Samoilovitch ...

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation today announced the winners of the 2025 Breakthrough Prizes, honoring scientists driving ...

Masaki Kashiwara received the honor, often regarded as the Nobel Prize in mathematics ... “First of all, he has solved some open conjectures — hard problems that have been around,” said ...

Growing up in Japan in the postwar years, Kashiwara was drawn to maths, he recalls a common Japanese maths problem known as ...

Two mathematicians now say they’ve made progress on a very old unsolved math problem. The problem involves a subfield called ...

It grew out of a series of conjectures proposing precise connections between seemingly disparate mathematical concepts. Such connections are powerful tools; for example, the proof of Fermat's Last ...