Experienced mathematicians warn up-and-comers to stay away from the Collatz conjecture. It’s a siren song, they say: Fall under its trance and you may never do meaningful work again. The Collatz ...

Mathematicians regard the Collatz conjecture as a quagmire and warn each other to stay away. But now Terence Tao has made more progress than anyone in decades. Experienced mathematicians warn ...

Related video: Check out some other brain-busting math problems above. Earlier this month, the long-awaited answer to a decades-old math problem was celebrated by mathletes everywhere, and now we’re ...

For all of the recent strides we’ve made in the math world—like a supercomputer finally solving the Sum of Three Cubes problem that puzzled mathematicians for 65 years—we’re forever crunching ...

This column comes with a warning: Do not try to solve this math problem. You will be tempted. This problem is simply stated, easily understood, and all too inviting. Just pick a number, any number: If ...

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 ...

Earlier this month, the long-awaited answer to a decades-old math problem was celebrated by mathletes everywhere, and now we’re one step closer to an even older numbers puzzle that has stumped the ...