When the Clay Mathematics Institute put individual $1-million prize bounties on seven unsolved mathematical problems, they may have undervalued one entry—by a lot. If mathematicians were to resolve, ...

When computer scientists hang out at cocktail parties, they're apt to chat, among other things, about the single most important unsolved problem in computer science: the question, Does P = NP?

Two weeks ago, a modest-looking paper was uploaded to the arXiv preprint server with the unassuming title “On the invariant subspace problem in Hilbert spaces”. The paper is just 13 pages long and its ...

University of California (UC) San Diego mathematicians Jacques Verstraete and Sam Mattheus have solved a puzzling Ramsey theory problem that's had little progress since the great Paul Erdös made some ...

The new version of AlphaZero discovered a faster way to do matrix multiplication, a core problem in computing that affects thousands of everyday computer tasks. DeepMind has used its board-game ...

Sudoku fan? After diving into the math behind the game, test your skills with our very own puzzles in SciAm Games! Computer science seemingly rides a curve of unstoppable progress. Mere decades took ...

A mathematician was keen to forecast the evolution of the COVID epidemic. Instead, he ended up solving a problem which had troubled computer scientists for decades. During the corona epidemic many of ...

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here. Earlier this week, my colleague Ian ...