The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an ...

Fefferman’s proof—along with subsequently discovered connections to number theory, combinatorics, and other areas—revived interest in the Kakeya problem among top mathematicians. In 1995, Thomas Wolff ...

In work that has been 30 years in the making, mathematicians have proved a major part of a profound mathematical vision called the Langlands program. A group of nine mathematicians has proved the ...