When checking that solutions to certain problems are correct, it turns out, you can’t get around the inherent complexity of ...

A movie character making a bafflingly stupid decision just to move the plot along can be frustrating. Thankfully, a recent thread on r/movies celebrates the exact opposite: cinematic stories where ...

There’s a good chance for Hoppers 2, but only if Pixar solves one major challenge. The director of the 2026 blockbuster Hoppers has finally addressed a key challenge facing a potential sequel. What is ...

The bees had to roll the ball under a blue "flower," then stand atop the moved object to access a sweet treat. Mikko Törmänen / University of Oulu Some bumblebees can spontaneously solve problems, a ...

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 ...

Bumblebees faced with a challenge know how to play ball. Buff-tailed bumblebees can figure out on their own how to use a ball as a ladder to nab sugar from an out-of-reach fake flower, researchers ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...