The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 2003, a German graduate student named Britta Späth encountered the McKay conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in the ...

Group theory isn’t just abstract math—it’s the hidden framework behind symmetry, structure, and transformation in everything from cryptography to quantum physics. It connects elegant patterns to ...

Using “refreshingly old” tools, mathematicians resolved a 50-year-old conjecture about how to categorize important functions called modular forms, with consequences for number theory and theoretical ...