When most people think about problem-solving, they instinctively start small. The logic seems simple: smaller problems should be easier to tackle, while bigger ones require more effort, resources, and ...

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 ...

Some readers may solve the problem procedurally: line up the two numbers, add the ones column, carry the one, and add the tens to get 43. Others might instead notice a creative shortcut: 29 + 14 is ...

Some kids struggle with math. Now, scientists have pinpointed some of the specific thinking processes and brain regions that might explain why math is a little harder for some than others. When given ...

In a dark room, in the middle of the night, a woman lies dreaming. Suddenly, her eyes beneath their lids dart crisply left-right, left-right. The eye signal means she knows she’s dreaming. Lucid ...

It has come to the author’s attention that Her Majesty the Queen has once again chosen eight ‘Diamonds of the Season’. However, this judgement remains in question, for a Diamond cannot be rare if ...

Over the past couple of months, several researchers have begun making the same provocative claim: They used generative-AI tools to solve a previously unanswered math problem. The most extreme promises ...

Do you stare at a math word problem and feel completely stuck? You're not alone. These problems mix reading comprehension with complex math concepts, making them a common hurdle for students. The good ...

She’ll always be the queen of glitter. Mariah Carey treated fans to a very glam performance during Friday’s Winter Olympics 2026 opening ceremony, singing the Italian classic “Volare” along with her ...

Five years ago, mathematicians Dawei Chen and Quentin Gendron were trying to untangle a difficult area of algebraic geometry involving differentials, elements of calculus used to measure distance ...

Over the weekend, Neel Somani, who is a software engineer, former quant researcher, and a startup founder, was testing the math skills of OpenAI’s new model when he made an unexpected discovery. After ...

In October 2024, news broke that Facebook parent company Meta had cracked an "impossible" problem that had stymied mathematicians for a century. In this case, the solvers weren't human. An artificial ...