Number Theory

"In a recent paper, Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University has settled an 85-year-old conjecture about one of math’s most ancient obsessions: the solutions to polynomial equations such as x2 – 3x + 2 = 0. 'It’s a great problem, famous old question,' said Andrew Granville, a professor at the University of Montreal. '[Bhargava] had an interesting, somewhat different approach, which was very creative.'"

"Lillian Pierce vividly remembers a moment when she was 4 years old, waiting in her family’s station wagon for her older brother and sister to get out of school, magnolia trees forming pink and white arches overhead. Her mother was sitting in the driver’s seat, writing sequences of numbers in blue ink, balancing her checkbook. Pierce was mesmerized."

"In a paper posted in September, Paul Nelson of the Institute for Advanced Study has solved the subconvexity problem, a kind of lighter-weight version of Riemann’s question. The proof is a significant achievement on its own and teases the possibility that even greater discoveries related to prime numbers may be in store."

Quanta magazine profiles James Maynard who made a breakthrough that led to the little-known twenty-six-year-old's rapid ascent to the top of his field, analytic number theory.

Maynard suspected that it might be possible to make progress on...

“It started to feel as if the program was within reach, so in the fall of 2016, to try to make further progress, Caraiani and Taylor organized what Calegari called a ‘secret’ workshop at the Institute for Advanced Study. ‘We took over the lecture room — no one else was allowed in,’ Calegari said."

Michael Giudici and Akshay Venkatesh became friends in their second-year studies, when Giudici was 18. Venkatesh was 12. He is believed to be the youngest person to enroll at the University of Western Australia.

“And he was much better than all the...

In 1892, the mathematician Otto Hölder posed a question that would occupy the field for more than a century: Is it possible to make a periodic table of all finite symmetry? The answer, to which hundreds of mathematicians have contributed, is yes...

The University of Oslo will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Atle Selberg's birth on June 14, 2017 and will feature a lecture by Peter Sarnak, Professor in the School of Mathematics. 

Come the middle of March, a remotely curious college-hoops observer, innocently typing “March Madness” into Google, encounters a swarm of numbers related to the N.C.A.A.’s annual basketball tournament. ... Ken Ono, Member (1995–97) in the School of...

Akshay Venkatesh, Member (2005–06) in the School of Mathematics, has been awarded the 2016 Infosys Prize in Mathematical Sciences by the Infosys Science Foundation. Venkatesh was cited for his exceptionally wide ranging, foundational, and creative...