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 is the mathematical study of symmetry and structure, forming one of the cornerstones of modern algebra. Emerging from early investigations into polynomial equations and the permutations ...

Group theory forms a cornerstone of modern algebra, providing a structured framework for analysing symmetries in mathematics, physics and beyond. A group is a set coupled with an operation that ...

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 ...