Take a group of runners circling a track at unique, constant paces. Answering the question of how many will always end up running alone, no matter their speed, has vexed mathematicians for decades.

WORKING OUT how to most efficiently pack a crate full of oranges may seem like a juvenile pursuit for professional mathematicians. And yet the sphere-packing problem, as this pastime is properly known ...

Axiom Math is giving away a powerful new AI tool. But it remains to be seen if it speeds up research as much as the company hopes. Axiom Math, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, has released a ...

Gerd Faltings proved a conjecture that had been unsolved for six decades, using connections between numbers and geometry. By Kenneth Chang A German mathematician, Gerd Faltings, is this year’s winner ...

The JavaScript innovation train is really picking up momentum lately, driven—as always—by the creativity of the JavaScript developer community. The emerging local-first SQL datastores crystalize ideas ...

Google has removed a whole section from its JavaScript SEO documentation because it was outdated and Google says loading content with JavaScript does not make it hard for Google Search. Google wrote ...

The race is on to develop an artificial intelligence that can do pure mathematics, and top mathematicians just threw down the gauntlet with an exam of actual, unsolved problems that are relevant to ...

Large language models struggle to solve research-level math questions. It takes a human to assess just how poorly they perform. By Siobhan Roberts A few weeks ago, a high school student emailed Martin ...

Strip the types and hotwire the HTML—and triple check your package security while you are at it. JavaScript in 2026 is just getting started. I am loath to inform you that the first month of 2026 has ...

Why does cancer sometimes recur even after successful treatment, or why do some bacteria survive despite the use of powerful antibiotics? One of the key culprits identified is "biological ...

Yosra Barkaoui’s doctoral dissertation in mathematics at the University of Vaasa, Finland, has successfully generalised a fundamental theorem that has been limited to the bounded case. The research ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Standing in the middle of a field, we can easily forget that we live on a round planet. We’re so small in comparison to the Earth that ...