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 ...

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 ...

The findings, published in Personality and Individual Differences, show that people with strong ADHD symptoms, such as inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity that can impair some aspects of daily ...

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 ...

Amateur mathematicians are using artificial intelligence chatbots to solve long-standing problems, in a move that has taken professionals by surprise. While the problems in question aren’t the most ...

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 ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at UC Berkeley, George Dantzig—a first-year graduate student—copied two problems ...

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 ...

The leading approach to the simplex method, a widely used technique for balancing complex logistical constraints, can’t get any better. In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at the ...

You probably don’t need more time. By Jancee Dunn When I look back on all the major decisions I’ve dithered over, I could scream. It took me a decade to commit to becoming a parent. I wavered for a ...

We are moving from a world of institutional dependency to one of personal responsibility. The question is no longer, “What can we do for people?” but, “How can we equip people to do more for ...

The busy box that is your brain is hard at work all day long—and it doesn’t quit when you’re asleep. Not only does your brain fill your slumber with dreams, it also goes right on solving the problems ...