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number theory

News story

Find the gap

There's been progress on one of the biggest open problems in maths: the twin prime conjecture.
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Manjul Bhargava: revealing numbers

Manjul Bhargava is being honoured as a number theorist of "extraordinary creativity," with "a taste for simple problems of timeless beauty."
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Easy as 1, 2, 3?

The natural numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, ..., are nice. So what could be nicer than discovering interesting patterns within them?
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From 70 million to just 600...

This year has seen a flurry of results as mathematicians hunt down the elusive proof of the twin prime conjecture. Will they get their wish for Christmas this year?
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icon

Twins move within reach

Agreeing to pay £50,000 for something worth £2 wouldn't win you any haggling competitions. In mathematics, however, a similar result can bring you international acclaim. This is the case with recent progress towards the famous twin prime conjecture.
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A very old problem turns 20

An "electric atomosphere" is not what you expect at a maths lecture. But it is what prevailed when Andrew Wiles announced his proof of a 350-year-old-old problem, Fermat's last theorem, exactly 20 years ago.
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Deligne

The Abel Prize 2013

This year's Abel Prize has been awarded to the Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne for "seminal contributions to algebraic geometry and for their transformative impact on number theory, representation theory, and related fields".
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Endre

The Abel Prize 2012

This year's Abel Prize goes to Endre Szemerédi for his "fundamental contributions to discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science."