J. R. Brown, Philosophy of mathematics: an introduction to the world of proofs and pictures, Routledge (1999). 2. R. B. Nelsen, Proofs without words I: exercises in ...

Since the start of the 20th century, the heart of mathematics has been the proof — a rigorous, logical argument for whether a given statement is true or false. Mathematicians’ careers are measured by ...

The same branch of mathematics that helped Einstein to formulate his theory of general relativity could now allow scientists to peer with unprecedented accuracy into impenetrable objects—such as the ...

https://doi.org/10.4169/amer.math.monthly.122.03.233 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.4169/amer.math.monthly.122.03.233 The Monthly publishes articles, as well as ...

As he was brushing his teeth on the morning of July 17, 2014, Thomas Royen, a little-known retired German statistician, suddenly lit upon the proof of a famous conjecture at the intersection of ...

When two mathematicians raised pointed questions about a classic proof that no one really understood, they ignited a years-long debate about how much could be trusted in a new kind of geometry. In the ...

If pure math can teach us anything, it’s this: occasionally, your special interest might just change the world. For Joshua Zahl and Hong Wang, that special interest was the Kakeya conjecture. “I read ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an ...

All equals are not created equal—mathematicians sometimes play fast and loose. In programming, equal signs mean different things, and variables have different types. Turning intuitive math expertise ...