Every so often, the Pentagon's blue sky research arm gets slammed, for funding investigations that are a little too down-to-Earth. Then Darpa turns around, and sponsors a new project to "develop a ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last ...

Number Theory is one of the oldest branches of modern mathematics. It is motivated by the study of properties of integers and solutions to equations in integers. Many of its problems can be stated ...

Number theorist Peter Scholze, who became Germany’s youngest ever full professor aged 24, and geometrician Caucher Birkar—a Kurdish refugee—are among the winners of this year’s Fields Medals, the most ...

There are three kinds of prime numbers. The first is a solitary outlier: 2, the only even prime. After that, half the primes leave a remainder of 1 when divided by 4. The other half leave a remainder ...

The number 1729 may look ordinary, but a casual remark by Srinivasa Ramanujan turned it into a mathematical legend, ...

Chantal David is one of the leading number theorists in Canada, known for significant and original research contributions. She is primarily interested in distribution questions for arithmetic objects ...

After the star-studded mystery thriller The Number 23 debuted in cinemas in 2007, many people became convinced that they were seeing the eponymous number everywhere. I was in school at that time, and ...