The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last ...

Like physics, math has its own set of “fundamental particles”—the prime numbers, which can’t be broken down into smaller ...

Number theory is the branch of mathematics that deals with the properties of whole numbers. Many number theorists are motivated purely by mathematical intrigue, and historically number theory had few ...

Their ambitions were always high. When Will Sawin and Melanie Matchett Wood first started working together in the summer of 2020, they set out to rethink the key components of some of the most ...

There are three kinds of prime numbers. The first is a solitary outlier: 2, the only even prime. After that, half the primes leave a remainder of 1 when divided by 4. The other half leave a remainder ...

Ananyo Bhattacharya is chief science writer at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences and the author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann. One of the biggest ...

MATH 11511 (Number Theory & Group Theory), MATH 21800 (Algebra 2). MATH 30200 (Number Theory), Group Theory (MATH 33300) and Galois Theory (MATH M2700) are recommended but not necessary. Students may ...

Number Theory is one of the oldest branches of modern mathematics. It is motivated by the study of properties of integers and solutions to equations in integers. Many of its problems can be stated ...