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Discrete mathematics is about precision in reasoning as much as it is about solving problems. Proof techniques like induction, contradiction, and direct reasoning are used to establish results in ...

Mathematician Kevin Buzzard of Imperial College London is training computers how to prove one of the most famous problems in math history: Fermat’s last theorem. Resolving the problem isn’t the point.

A mathematician will turn a groundbreaking 100-page proof into computer code. The proof tool, Lean, lets users turn proofs written in prose into rules and logic for testing. Kevin Buzzard already uses ...

In ancient Greece, Euclid showed that if you agree on a small list of preliminary principles, or axioms, you can use deductive reasoning to reveal all sorts of new mathematical truths. But although ...

Yesterday I was doing some literature review for an article I’m writing about my inverted transition-to-proof class, and I got around to reading a paper by Guershon Harel and Larry Sowder¹ about ...

A graduate student recently harnessed the complexity of mathematical proofs to create a powerful new tool in cryptography.