This is an updated version of a story first published on May 5, 2024. For many high school students returning to class, it may seem like geometry and trigonometry were created by the Greeks as a form ...

Two high school students proved the Pythagorean theorem in a way that one early 20th-century mathematician thought would be impossible: by using trigonometry. Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson, both ...

The Pythagorean Theorem—discovered by the Greek mathematician Pythagoras in the 6th century BCE—is a cornerstone of mathematics. Simply stated as a 2 + b 2 = c 2, the theorem posits that the sum of ...

In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last Theorem, a central problem in number theory that had remained open ...

Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson, two Black seniors from St. Mary’s Academy in New Orleans, have done the unthinkable. In 2022, the amazing students created proof for the Pythagorean Theorem, which ...

A mathematician will turn a groundbreaking 100-page proof into computer code. The proof tool, Lean, lets users turn proofs written in prose into rules and logic for testing. Kevin Buzzard already uses ...

Maxine Calle is a 2023 AAAS Mass Media Fellow at The Conversation U.S. and she receives funding from the National Science Foundation. David Bressoud does not work for, consult, own shares in or ...

Mathematics is traditionally a solitary science. In 1986 Andrew Wiles withdrew to his study for seven years to prove Fermat’s theorem. The resulting proofs are often difficult for colleagues to ...