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 ...

In ancient Greece, Euclid showed that if you agree on a small list of preliminary principles, or axioms, you can use deductive reasoning to reveal all sorts of new mathematical truths. But although ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. We like to think that we're pretty good at math, especially after years of schooling. But every once in a while, a simple ...