You enter a cave. At the end of a dark corridor, you encounter a pair of sealed chambers. Inside each chamber is an all-knowing wizard. The prophecy says that with these oracles’ help, you can learn ...

Many dynamic processes can be described mathematically with the aid of stochastic partial differential equations. Scientists have found a new method which helps to solve a certain class of such ...

The verdict, it seems, is in: artificial intelligence is not about to replace mathematicians. That is the immediate takeaway from the “First Proof” challenge—perhaps the most robust test yet of the ...

Marijn Heule turns mathematical statements into something like Sudoku puzzles, then has computers go to work on them. His proofs have been called “disgusting,” but they go beyond what any human can do ...

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. In 1997, Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by IBM, did the unexpected: it defeated chess ...