Mathematicians from New York University and the University of British Columbia have resolved a decades-old geometric problem, the Kakeya conjecture in 3D, which studies the shape left behind by a ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Two mathematicians now say they’ve made progress on a very old unsolved math problem. The problem ...

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"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." A 125-page proof posted to arXiv may represent a huge breakthrough in geometric measure theory. This ...

(via Quanta) 2025 marked a historic year in mathematics. Researchers solved a major case of Hilbert’s ambitious sixth problem, proved a sweeping new theorem about hyperbolic surfaces, and settled the ...

The Kakeya conjecture lies at the very base of this tower. If it is false, then so are the statements higher in the hierarchy. On the other hand, proving it true wouldn’t immediately imply the truth ...