Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, ...

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 ...

Think about placing dots on a flat surface. You want as many pairs as possible to be separated by the same distance. For any amount of dots, what is the greatest possible number of pairs that can be ...

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 ...

remove-circle Internet Archive's in-browser bookreader "theater" requires JavaScript to be enabled. It appears your browser does not have it turned on. Please see ...

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 ...

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 ...

Artificial intelligence can now solve open research-level mathematics problems — not just competition questions — and the May 2026 issue of Science News documents the moment the field registered that ...

“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 ...

It started almost by accident. At my startup Dwelly, I constantly push the limits of what AI tools can actually do. One day I just typed into a chat: “Can you prove P ≠ NP?”—referring to the problem ...

The tech giant says a breakthrough in data center networking has dramatically accelerated the flow of information through its massive cloud infrastructure. The new technology hinges on a “quasi-random ...

A machine just solved math problems that stumped humans for decades. Google DeepMind’s AlphaProof Nexus, a system that fuses large language models with the Lean formal proof assistant, has ...