In 1945, as the first atomic bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert, Enrico Fermi stood miles away, holding a few scraps of paper. As the shockwave rolled toward him, he dropped the papers and watched ...

Last month, OpenAI announced that its latest version of ChatGPT had solved a major math problem, one that had stumped experts ...

Richard Feynman could turn almost anything into physics and math. Even lunch. One day in the late 1970s, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist sat in a Thai restaurant in Glendale, California, with his ...

Artificial intelligence is mastering the kinds of projects that have long helped to build the careers of young mathematicians. What does that mean for their future? Credit...Illustrations by Yoshi ...

Bumblebees faced with a challenge know how to play ball. Buff-tailed bumblebees can figure out on their own how to use a ball as a ladder to nab sugar from an out-of-reach fake flower, researchers ...

Despite having tiny brains, bumblebees have demonstrated a remarkable ability to socially learn how to use tools, solve simple puzzles, and cooperate to achieve a goal. It seems they can also solve ...

Mathematician Will Sawin discusses his experience reviewing and refining a mathematical proof devised by OpenAI's internal model—and what that could mean for mathematics. Reading time 10 minutes Will ...

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 ...

Richard Feynman described a decision-making problem and its solution in handwritten notes, but the meaning of the notes has been a mystery for almost 50 y. We decipher the problem and solution from ...

Working memory is like a mental chalkboard we use to store temporary information while executing other tasks. Scientists worked with more than 200 elementary students to test their working memory, ...

A recent announcement that an artificial intelligence model succeeded in solving a decades-old mathematical problem that had eluded generations of accomplished mathematicians was widely portrayed as ...

“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 ...