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It is one the oldest mathematical problems in the world. Several centuries ago, the twin primes conjecture was formulated. As its name indicates, this hypothesis, which many science historians have attributed to the Greek mathematician Euclid, deals with prime numbers, those divisible only by themselves and by one (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc.). Under this assumption, there exists an infinite number of pairs of prime numbers whose difference is two, called twin primes (e.g., 3 and 5), but nobody has been able to confirm this so far.

The ‘music of the spheres’ was born from the effort to use numbers to explain the universeAn image of a white half circle at the bottom-center on a starry background. There are 8 arches spreading away from the circle. The Pythagoreans believed that the motions of the heavenly bodies, with just the right ratios of their distances from a central fire, made pleasant music — a concept that evolved into the “music of the spheres.” If you’ve ever heard the phrase “the music of the spheres,” your first thought probably wasn’t about mathematics. But in its historical origin, the music...

At an American Mathematical Society meeting, high school students presented a proof of the Pythagorean theorem that used trigonometry—an approach that some once considered impossibleTwo high school students have proved the Pythagorean theorem in a way that one early 20th-century mathematician thought was impossible: using trigonometry. Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson, both at St. Mary’s Academy in New Orleans, announced their achievement last month at an American Mathematical Society meeting. “It’s an unparalleled feeling, honestly, because there’s just nothing like it, being able to do something that ... people don’t think that young people can do,” Johnson told WWL-TV, a...