On June 23, 1993, the mathematician Andrew Wiles gave the last of three lectures detailing his solution to Fermat’s last theorem, a problem that had remained unsolved for three and a half centuries.

Mathematics is distinguished from the sciences by the freedom it enjoys in choosing basic assumptions from which consequences can be deduced by applying the laws of logic. We call the basic ...

“You don’t have to believe in God, but you have to believe in The Book,” the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős once said. The Book, which only exists in theory, contains the most elegant proofs of ...

Here's a scene from "The Royale," an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that aired March 27, 1989. In it, Captain Jean-Luc Picard tells his First Officer, Commander Riker, about his work in ...

Herbert Simon, the Nobel-prize winning economist, was a techno-enthusiast. In 1956 he predicted that, “within 10 years, computers would beat the world chess champion, compose ‘aesthetically satisfying ...

The field of theorem proving and higher‐order logic represents a confluence of computer science, mathematics and formal logic. It encompasses the automated and interactive approaches to establishing ...

During my time as an eager undergraduate mathematician, I’d often wonder what it would feel like to prove a truly new result and have my name immortalised in the mathematical history books. I thought ...