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America, we’ve got a middle school problem. Although reading and math scores are up for 9-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ Long-Term Trend assessment, scores haven’t ...

Artificial intelligence is mastering the kinds of projects that have long helped to build the careers of young mathematicians. What does that mean for their future? Credit...Illustrations by Yoshi ...

Think about placing dots on a flat surface. You want as many pairs as possible to be separated by the same distance. For any amount of dots, what is the greatest possible number of pairs that can be ...

Despite having tiny brains, bumblebees have demonstrated a remarkable ability to socially learn how to use tools, solve simple puzzles, and cooperate to achieve a goal. It seems they can also solve ...

Place any number of dots on a two-dimensional plane—say, a piece of paper—and measure the distance between each pair. If you rearrange the dots, how many pairs could be positioned exactly the same ...

Social Security’s finances may be in worse shape than thought. The Social Security Trustees — who release a report each year on the health of the program that supports about 70 million retirees and ...

In mid-May, OpenAI announced that an internal AI model had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a famous problem in discrete geometry that had stumped human mathematicians for the last 80 ...

Artificial intelligence can now solve open research-level mathematics problems — not just competition questions — and the May 2026 issue of Science News documents the moment the field registered that ...

“If you are a mathematician,” one of the world’s leading mathematicians recently wrote, “you may want to make sure you are sitting down before reading further.” And you’ll definitely need to sit down ...

This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more. This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more. News about AI math problem raises realization that finding counterexamples can be extremely ...