At first glance, the problem seems ridiculously simple. And yet experts have been searching for a solution in vain for decades. According to mathematician Jeffrey Lagarias, number theorist Shizuo ...

Description: Take any positive integer. If it is even, divide it by 2. If it is odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1. This produces a new positive integer. Repeat this process, producing a sequence of ...

P vs. NP asks: are these two classes actually the same? If P = NP, then every “hard” problem is secretly fast to solve; we ...

You can probably think of a time when you’ve used math to solve an everyday problem, such as calculating a tip at a restaurant or determining the square footage of a room. But what role does math play ...

An institution has offered a $1 million prize to anyone who can solve a famous math problem that has puzzled mathematicians for more than a century. The Riemann hypothesis, first proposed by German ...

In principle, this impossible math allows for a glue-free bridge of stacked blocks that can stretch across the Grand Canyon—and into infinity Keep going. If you stack as many blocks as you can, what ...

An attempt at tackling the intractable Collatz conjecture is a “noble failure” demonstrating the promise of automated reasoning techniques. The computer scientist Marijn Heule is always on the lookout ...

The question goes: "A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?" Is your knee-jerk response that the ball costs 10 cents? That is a ...