Randomness would seem to make a mathematical statement harder to prove. In fact, it often does the opposite. Of all the tools available to the mathematician, randomness would seem to offer little ...

Avi Wigderson is the first recipient of both a Turing Award and an Abel Prize, math's top honor. Andrea Kane / Institute for Advanced Study The 2023 Turing Award—the computing world’s Nobel Prize ...

Amanda Redlich spends much of her time pondering complex, abstract, mathematical questions. As assistant professor of mathematics, she teaches courses in multivariate calculus, probability, and ...

2020 Abel Prize laureates Hillel Furstenberg (left) and Gregory Margulis (right) Photo: Dan Rezetti Scientists Hillel Furstenberg and Gregory Margulis have won this year’s Abel Prize, which is ...

David Conlon and Asaf Ferber have raised the lower bound for multicolor “Ramsey numbers,” which quantify how big graphs can get before patterns inevitably emerge. “There is no absolute randomness in ...

We were all fascinated, and perhaps intimidated, in school when we learned Euclid’s geometry and the way he was able to prove statements and declare facts that exceeded human experience. Euclid did ...

Excerpted from Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence by James Bridle. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright ...

In the real world, probability is a tough thing to characterize. If I roll a die, what does it mean to say that it has a one-sixth chance of coming up 5? We say that the outcome is random because we ...