When I was 9, my family got a new computer. It was better than our old computer in every way save one: It couldn’t run my favorite racing game. What’s the point of a fancy new computer, I remember ...

Mathematicians love a good puzzle. Even something as abstract as multiplying matrices (two-dimensional tables of numbers) can feel like a game when you try to find the most efficient way to do it.

The new version of AlphaZero discovered a faster way to do matrix multiplication, a core problem in computing that affects thousands of everyday computer tasks. DeepMind has used its board-game ...

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, ...