They say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but for computer scientists, two birds in a hole are better still. That’s because those cohabiting birds are the protagonists of a deceptively ...

When the Clay Mathematics Institute put individual $1-million prize bounties on seven unsolved mathematical problems, they may have undervalued one entry—by a lot. If mathematicians were to resolve, ...

Descriptive set theorists study the niche mathematics of infinity. Now, they’ve shown that their problems can be rewritten in the concrete language of algorithms. All of modern mathematics is built on ...

From powering search engines to securing data and optimizing networks, algorithms underpin nearly every aspect of modern technology. Understanding how efficiently they can solve problems — and where ...

When computer scientists hang out at cocktail parties, they're apt to chat, among other things, about the single most important unsolved problem in computer science: the question, Does P = NP?

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in ...