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A well known University of California-Berkeley mathematics professor has slammed admissions standards at the top-flight university — where she says huge portions of her students are failing to keep up with college calculus and she’s forced to teach middle-school algebra and fractions students. “Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school,” wrote Zvezdelina Stankova, of UC Berkeley, in an op-ed piece on Saturday for the San Francisco Standard. Stankova — who rose through...

Jacob Tsimerman won the biggest prize in math. Now he’s working on the most important problem of his career.When he won the Fields Medal last week, Jacob Tsimerman accepted the most prestigious honor in math wearing a powder-blue tuxedo with satin lapels.Then he made an announcement as striking as his tux. After the ceremony, the four winning mathematicians were asked what they planned to do next. One said he would keep working on partial differential equations, one said he wanted to experiment with artificial intelligence and one said she had absolutely no idea. That left Tsimerman.“I’ll be starting a position...

Google Deepmind's new framework AlphaProof Nexus has autonomously solved nine out of 353 open Erdős problems it attempted, including two questions that had gone unanswered for 56 years. The system also proved 44 out of 492 open conjectures from the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS), settled a 15-year-old question about Hilbert functions in algebraic geometry, and improved a known bound in convex optimization. Inference costs ran just a few hundred dollars per problem, according to the research paper. Unlike (potentially) pure natural-language approaches such as OpenAI's recent solution, the underlying language model in AlphaProof Nexus—in this case Gemini 3.1...

Anthropic just published a study mapping exactly which jobs its own AI is replacing right now. The workers most at risk are not who anyone expected. They are older. They are more educated. They earn 47% more than average. And they are nearly four times more likely to hold a graduate degree than the workers AI is not touching. The argument is straightforward. Anthropic built a new metric called "observed exposure." Not what AI could theoretically do. What it is actually doing right now in professional settings, measured against millions of real Claude conversations from enterprise users. For computer and...

I wondered if any FRiends were interested in prime numbers. You'll know that prime numbers are integers, and those which have only two factors, 1 and themselves. Except for 2, all other primes are odd numbers. By convention, the number 1 is not considered prime (but this is strictly a matter of definition because 1 does not entirely contradict the premise of being a multiple of 1 and itself). I cannot post this entire thread in one post so if you come across it in an early stage, be aware that a number of posts will follow rapidly until I...

Scientists have discovered a groundbreaking phenomenon where light materializes from nothingness, opening the door to revolutionary advances in physics and technology. In a groundbreaking new study, researchers from the University of Rostock and the University of Birmingham have made a surprising discovery that challenges the long-held understanding of time and space in physics. Their research, recently published in Nature Photonics, reveals the existence of “space-time-topological events” where light appears to emerge from and disappear into nothingness—a phenomenon that initially seems like magic, but is grounded in deep mathematical principles. Rethinking Time and Space in Physics Time has long been considered...

Hong Wang, an associate professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, presenting her work on the Kakeya conjecture on March 10, 2025. Credit: David Song/NYU. ================================================================== Professors from NYU and the University of British Columbia have resolved the Kakeya set conjecture in three dimensions. Mathematicians from New York University and the University of British Columbia have resolved a long-standing geometric problem known as the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions. This conjecture explores the minimal space required for a needle, or line segment, to point in every direction within a given space. The idea originates from a 1917 question posed...

Mathematicians have proven that Henry Dudeney’s 1907 four-piece dissection of an equilateral triangle into a square is optimal. Using matching diagrams, researchers from JAIST and MIT showed that no three-piece solution exists, marking the first formal proof of optimality in dissection problems. Their work has applications in mathematics, engineering, and material sciences. ======================================================================================= Researchers have demonstrated, using a novel approach, that the original solution to Dudeney’s famous dissection problem is indeed the optimal one. In 1907, English author and mathematician Henry Ernest Dudeney posed a fascinating puzzle: Can an equilateral triangle be cut into the fewest possible pieces that can...

The ‘music of the spheres’ was born from the effort to use numbers to explain the universeAn image of a white half circle at the bottom-center on a starry background. There are 8 arches spreading away from the circle. The Pythagoreans believed that the motions of the heavenly bodies, with just the right ratios of their distances from a central fire, made pleasant music — a concept that evolved into the “music of the spheres.” If you’ve ever heard the phrase “the music of the spheres,” your first thought probably wasn’t about mathematics. But in its historical origin, the music...

A New Jersey law that removes a requirement for teachers to pass a reading, writing and mathematics test for certification will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2025. The law, Act 1669, was passed by Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy as part of the state’s 2025 budget in June in an effort to address a shortage of teachers in the state... Individuals seeking an instructional certificate will no longer need to pass a “basic skills” test ... Just months earlier, Murphy signed a similar bill into law that created an alternative pathway for teachers to sidestep the testing requirement....

I am getting a lot of people who say the answer is 9, but you can get 9 from 6/2(1+2) if you separate the 2 from the 2(1+2), which seems incorrect to me. I view the 2(1+2) as a complete phrase within the mathematical question, so I think it needs to be solved before you move left to right. 6/2(1+2) = 6/2(3) = 6/6 = 1 But there are a lot of people who want to write the question as 6/2 x (1+2), which is the only way you will get 9.

It’s an idea straight out of the schoolyard: that you might one day accidentally count so high that you break the laws of math. A new preprint (that has not yet been peer-reviewed) seems to have done just that, however – and it could have huge ramifications for how we ought to understand infinity. It’s fitting that such a baffling result would have come from set theory: it’s an area with a reputation for being abstract and often counter-intuitive; it has its own esoteric alphabet and language; and it’s famous for results that seem either too basic to have even...

When you were in 4th grade frantically completing a timed multiplication test, if you were any color other than white, you were being oppressed by the pressure to get it done quickly. Were you penalized for an incorrect answer? Doubly oppressed! Was your grade lowered because your handwriting was illegible on your answers? No doubt, you are now owed reparations! As ridiculous as this sounds, this is the current reality our black and brown public-school students are facing. Especially if their left-leaning math instructors have bought into the ridiculous ideology that “rigid” (and practical) math instruction is “white supremacist” and...

Calcea Johnson and Ne'Kiya Jackson have added four further novel proofs of the theorem that had also not been published before, and left clues for another five. Teen mathematicians Ne’Kiya Jackson (left) and Calcea Johnson (right) who have done what mathematics texts said was impossible, finding a non-circular trigonometric proof of Pythagoras Theorem. Image Credit: Calcea Johnson High school students Calcea Johnson and Ne'Kiya Jackson did something in 2023 that most mathematicians had thought impossible: They discovered a way to prove Pythagoras' theorem using trigonometry that did not depend on circular reasoning. Now, they have published their work in a...

String theory scientists studying the behavior of high energy particles say they have stumbled upon a mathematical “hack” that revealed a whole new way to represent the irrational number Pi. While the research is purely theoretical, the duo behind the Pi hack says this kind of theoretical work holds rewarding potential. The researchers also believe their work could lead to a number of potential breakthroughs in the future, similar to how theoretical breakthroughs made by physicists nearly a hundred years ago resulted in technological advancements decades later. AFTER 4,000 YEARS, PI IS STILL A MYSTERY Defined as the ratio of...

Wow! Two high school seniors solved a mathematical puzzle that has stumped mankind for 2,000 years. "60 Minutes" did a nice feature on the pair, and earned themselves a Community Note in the process. Two high school seniors solved a mathematical puzzle that was thought to be impossible for 2,000 years. @BillWhitakerCBS reports, Sunday. https://t.co/mEN4CWeXMW pic.twitter.com/iPhsZiERsc — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) May 2, 2024 Readers added context they thought people might want to know This puzzle was solved 15 years ago… I studied physics and this isn't a discovery, it was published in a paper over 15 years ago, they've just...

Supporting kids with math homework is a common afterschool activity. But beyond the basics, new curricula and teaching strategies are making it harder for parents to help and it's taking a serious toll on children's confidence and learning. In a study from the University of South Australia, researchers have found that mathematics homework can sometimes cause more harm than good. Exploring how homework policies and practices affect families, researchers found that mathematics homework could inadvertently affect a child when it often: was too difficult for a child to complete independently, and/or with the support of a parent required significant support...

I don’t have a mathematics background, but have done well in math generally, understand some of the concepts. I’ve been interested in this problem since seeing a YouTube video from the science channel Veritasium on the subject. After going over it for a time, I noticed some patterns in the numbers that are most divisible by 2. Here’s a summary of what I found, and I wonder how it fits into the picture. 1. Starting from 0: 3(0)+1=1. 2. Next, starting from 1: 3(1)+1=4. That’s the initial “4>2>1.” 3. Then, substitute 2: 3(2)+1=7. And 3: 3(3)+1=10. And 4: 3(4)+1=13. 4....

"This is the third coin of this type found in excavations in Jerusalem, and one of the few ever found in archeological excavations," said the researchers.During the Great Revolt against Rome, the Jews in Jerusalem minted bronze and silver coins. Most of the silver coins featured a goblet on one side, with ancient Hebrew script above it noting the year of the Revolt. Depending on its denomination, the coins also included an inscription around the border noting either, "Israel Shekel," "Half-Shekel," or "Quarter-Shekel." The other side of these coins showcased a branch with three pomegranates, surrounded by an inscription in...

Actor Terrence Howard reportedly said it is "immoral for the United States government to charge taxes to the descendants of slaves" after being ordered to pay nearly $1 million in back taxes. According to a report from the Philadelphia Inquirer on Thursday, a federal judge in Philadelphia ordered the Academy Award-nominated actor to pay $903,115 in back taxes, penalties and interest. "For more than a year, the 54-year-old star of the TV hit ‘Empire,’ whose last listed address was in Plymouth Meeting, rebuffed IRS efforts to collect $578,000 in income taxes it says he failed to pay between 2010 and...