As a high school student in the mid-1990s, Pace Nielsen encountered a mathematical question that he’s still struggling with to this day. But he doesn’t feel bad: The problem that captivated him, ...

One idle evening last October, Mehtaab Sawhney took up an old pastime. He began perusing the website erdosproblems.com, an updated record of the 1,179 conjectures left behind by the eccentric and ...

For millennia, mathematicians have wondered whether odd perfect numbers exist, establishing an extraordinary list of restrictions for the hypothetical objects in the process. Insight on this question ...