One of the oldest and simplest problems in geometry has caught mathematicians off guard—and not for the first time. Since antiquity, artists and geometers have wondered how shapes can tile the entire ...

Arithmetic geometry is a vibrant field at the intersection of number theory and algebraic geometry, focussing on the study of polynomial equations and the distribution of their rational solutions.

In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an infinitely thin, inch-long needle on a flat surface, then rotate ...

A mathematician from UNSW Sydney has unveiled an incredible discovery of an ancient clay tablet believed to be the oldest and most complete example of applied geometry. The clay tablet that holds the ...

He went around the world looking for examples of how the Babylonians might have used what the mathematician calls 'proto-trigonometry' in surveying. The 3,700-year-old tablet sitting in an Istanbul ...

They made some progress, re-proving the conjecture in two dimensions using different techniques—ones they hoped would be applicable to the three-dimensional case. But then they hit a wall. “At some ...