Sarah Rudd, who once ran analytics for Arsenal, made her name applying the tenets of probability theory to movements on the pitch. Even she admits not everything can be solved with data. The role of advanced analytics in sports is a contentious subject. To its defenders, data-driven pragmatism is a natural evolutionary step in the way we play and watch games. For detractors, the approach prioritizes results above all else and drains the soul from a pursuit that should be spontaneous and joyful.

Christopher Havens was approved for release by the Washington State Clemency Board. All he needed was the governor's signature. Christopher Havens has a part-time position as research staff at the University of California at Los Angeles. And he's had a prolific few years. In June 2020, Havens published an article in the journal Research in Number Theory with co-authors from the University of Torino in Italy.

One of the most bitterly contested proofs in modern mathematics may be on the verge of being untangled. Two projects, both aiming to use a computer program to cast new light on the controversy, are now up and running - with one having operated in secret for more than two years already. The developments are a positive sign that the row might find a solution, say mathematicians. The saga began in 2012 when Shinichi Mochizuki at Kyoto University, Japan, claimed to have proved a famous idea called the ABC conjecture, posting a 500-page proof online. The conjecture is simple to state, concerning prime numbers involved in solutions to the equation a + b = c and how these numbers relate to each other.

Gödel's seminal work directly contradicted one of the great minds of mathematics and limited the field forever Kurt Gödel, the man who ruined mathematics, was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. He was born in 1906, smack-bang in the middle of the greatest crisis that maths has ever known. Just a few decades later, he would help resolve this turmoil, but in doing so doom mathematicians to a smaller world than the one that came before. Mathematics, as an intellectual framework, is incredibly powerful. The entire point is taking one set of logical ideas and using them to build another, making maths the closest thing we have to a cognitive perpetual-motion machine - there is always a new mathematical idea lurking across the horizon, and we just need to assemble the steps to get there.

Many people who try using AI are disappointed with the results and feel they can't trust a machine - but are there lessons we can learn from how AI is taking on mathematics? Have you ever received an email and had a sneaking suspicion it was written by AI, rather than lovingly handcrafted? Mathematicians have been wrestling with similar feelings for half a century, and have some lessons for the rest of us. It all began in 1976, when Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken announced a proof of the four colour theorem, which states it takes a maximum of four shades to colour any map so that no two adjacent regions match. The theorem's simplicity meant mathematicians were expecting an elegant proof revealing a greater mathematical truth. Instead, they got 60,000 lines of impenetrable computer code.

The speed at which artificial intelligence is gaining in mathematical ability has taken many by surprise. Are the days of handwritten mathematics coming to an end? In March 2025, mathematician Daniel Litt made a bet. Despite the march of progress of artificial intelligence in many fields, he believed his subject was safe, wagering with a colleague that there was only a 25 per cent chance an AI could write a mathematical paper at the level of the best human mathematicians by 2030. Only a year later, he thinks he was wrong.

Hannah Fry: 'AI can do some superhuman things - but so can forklifts' Mathematician Hannah Fry travels to the front lines of AI in her new BBC documentary AI Confidential with Hannah Fry. The chances are that you think about artificial intelligence far more today than you did five years ago. Since ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, we have become accustomed to interacting with AIs in most spheres of life, from chatbots and smart home tech to banking and healthcare. But such rapid change brings unexpected problems - as mathematician and broadcaster Hannah Fry shows in AI Confidential With Hannah Fry, a new three-part BBC documentary in which she talks to people whose lives have been transformed by the technology. She spoke to New Scientist about how we should view AI, its role in modern mathematics - and why it will upend the global economy.

This paper concerns the structure of learned representations in text-guided generative models, focusing on score-based models.

Paul Erdős was one of the most prolific mathematicians to ever live, known for showing up at the door of others in the field and declaring they should host and feed him while they do maths together. I come to you with something a little different for my latest maths column - a plea to Hollywood to make a comedy biopic about one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Paul Erdős. Why is Erdős (pronounced "air-dish") deserving of such acclaim? With almost 1500 papers to his name, he is probably the most prolific mathematician that ever lived, and possibly that will ever live. Unsurprisingly, with that many papers, he is known for his work across many areas of maths, from probability to number theory to graph theory.