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Decade-long struggle over maths proof could be decided by $1m prize

11 July 2023

Mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki's Inter-universal Teichmüller theory has attracted controversy since it was published in 2012, with no one able to agree whether it is true. Now, a $1 million prize is being launched to settle the matter

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Mathematicians make even better never-repeating tile discovery

30 May 2023

An unsatisfying caveat in a mathematical breakthrough discovery of a single tile shape that can cover a surface without ever creating a repeating pattern has been eradicated. The newly discovered "spectre" shape can cover a surface without repeating...

Mathematicians discover shape that can tile a wall and never repeat

21 March 2023

Aperiodic tiling, in which shapes can fit together to create infinite patterns that never repeat, has fascinated mathematicians for decades, but until now no one knew if it could be done with just one shape

Mathematical trick lets hackers shame people into fixing software bugs

17 January 2023

Security researchers who find a flaw in software normally privately inform the developers of it in the hope of prompting a fix, but now a mathematical trick can let them apply public pressure without releasing dangerous details of the bug

Young girl writing multiplication equations on a blackboard

Humans beat DeepMind AI in creating algorithm to multiply numbers

13 October 2022

One week after DeepMind revealed an algorithm for multiplying numbers more efficiently, researchers have an even better way to carry out the task

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DeepMind AI finds new way to multiply numbers and speed up computers

5 October 2022

Matrix multiplication - where two grids of numbers are multiplied together - forms the basis of many computing tasks, and an improved technique discovered by an artificial intelligence could boost computation speeds by up to 20 per cent

The four Fields medal winners, clockwise from top left: Maryna Viazovska, James Maynard, Hugo Duminil-Copin and June Huh

Fields medal 2022: Work on prime numbers and spheres wins maths prize

5 July 2022

Mathematicians who have studied the most efficient way to pack spheres in eight-dimensional space and the spacing of prime numbers are among this year's recipients of the highest award in mathematics, the Fields medal