Descriptive set theorists study the niche mathematics of infinity. Now, they’ve shown that their problems can be rewritten in the concrete language of algorithms. All of modern mathematics is built on ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 2003, a German graduate student named Britta Späth encountered the McKay conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in the ...

For all of the recent strides we’ve made in the math world—like a supercomputer finally solving the Sum of Three Cubes problem that puzzled mathematicians for 65 years—we’re forever crunching ...

Mathematical logic, set theory, lattices and universal algebra form an interconnected framework that underpins much of modern mathematics. At its heart, mathematical logic provides rigorous formal ...

We recently wrote about how infinitely large sets are not all the same size as each other, but we were a bit vague about what we meant by a set. The people who invented set theory also started out ...

After the star-studded mystery thriller The Number 23 debuted in cinemas in 2007, many people became convinced that they were seeing the eponymous number everywhere. I was in school at that time, and ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in ...

In 2003, a German graduate student named Britta Späth encountered the McKay conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in the mathematical realm known as group theory. At first her goals were ...