M. Ram Murtyobtained his PhD in 1980 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) specializing in number theory. After post-doctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Fields Medal, the world’s highest honor for mathematical research, has gone to two mathematicians who forged new links between different branches of mathematics. The recipients–announced this week ...

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 ...

Representation theory was initially dismissed. Today, it’s central to much of mathematics. When representation theory emerged in the late 19th century, many mathematicians questioned its worth. In ...

Number theory is the branch of mathematics that deals with the properties of whole numbers. Many number theorists are motivated purely by mathematical intrigue, and historically number theory had few ...