This week's UK heatwave caused school closures and disrupted learning, but it also reminded me of one of the most important ...

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 ...

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 ...

Despite having tiny brains, bumblebees have demonstrated a remarkable ability to socially learn how to use tools, solve simple puzzles, and cooperate to achieve a goal. It seems they can also solve ...

German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler set up a famous experiment more than 100 years ago that changed how scientists understand animal intelligence and the power of insight — or spontaneous ...

A famed physicist’s scribbles reveal the answer to a quintessential dilemma: When dining out, is it better to stick with an old favorite, or try something new? Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard ...

Working memory is like a mental chalkboard we use to store temporary information while executing other tasks. Scientists worked with more than 200 elementary students to test their working memory, ...

A recent announcement that an artificial intelligence model succeeded in solving a decades-old mathematical problem that had eluded generations of accomplished mathematicians was widely portrayed as ...

“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.” ...

OpenAI claims its new reasoning model has produced an original mathematical proof disproving a famous unsolved conjecture in geometry, which was first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. If this sounds ...