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 ...

AI can rifle through enormous libraries of information to connect far-flung ideas—conceptual leaps remain a purely human skill. The planar unit distance problem, or Erdős problem 90, has intrigued ...

Last week, OpenAI shocked the mathematical community by revealing that one of its internal artificial intelligence (AI) models had found a counterexample to a famous conjecture made by legendary ...

America has a spending problem. It also has a health care problem. These are not two separate crises but rather the same crisis wearing different clothes. The Cato Institute's new Handbook on ...

The U.S. blockade of Iran continues amid an uncertain round of peace negotiations, while Congress wrestles with the ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown and the looming lapse of a key ...

L ast semester, I decided that I would no longer assign analytical papers in any of my large social-science classes. This is a drastic change: My usual framework is that large four-unit classes should ...

The best way to fix Americans’ cost-of-living problem is to give workers bigger raises, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said last week. The problem: That solution looks broken, too. The US job ...

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Sergio Mendoza Hochmann / Getty; Pierre Michaud / Gamma-Rapho / Getty. With respect to Andrews, in the midst of all this—the testosterone-addled executive branch ...

In principle, this impossible math allows for a glue-free bridge of stacked blocks that can stretch across the Grand Canyon—and into infinity Keep going. If you stack as many blocks as you can, what ...

Physicist Richard Feynman turned a lunch dilemma into a math problem. Researchers finally cracked his notes and found people approximate his solution on their own.