Atle Selberg, one of the last of the 20th century's great mathematicians, who had "a golden touch" in expanding on the work of his predecessors, died of a heart attack Aug. 6 at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 90.

If you were counting on infinity being absolute, your number's up

Many people believe that mathematics provides a model of what thinking is, or should be. They imagine that mathematical thinking always proceeds in a logically rigorous, step-by-step fashion from one truth to another, like a formal proof or a computer program. In fact, insights in mathematics — whether they are the scholar's breakthroughs or the student's leap to a new level of understanding — involve a different mode of thinking that is essentially nonlogical.

Danica McKellar, who played Winnie on the 1990s television show "The Wonder Years," is coming out with a book, "Math Doesn't Suck," to encourage girls to get into math.

When Steven Haataja came to this remote corner of Nebraska, where cowboy hats are still worn for work and rodeo trophies greet visitors to the local college, it was supposed to be a new beginning for the mathematician who had just earned his doctorate.

A century-old mathematical problem that may help solve the mysteries of the universe and lead to new breakthroughs in science, engineering and finance has been computed by an international group of mathematicians, including UMass Boston Professor Alfred Noel.

Numerologists: Your moment is about to arrive. Mathematicians and lottery players: You may want to pay attention, too. On Sunday, at 02:03:04 a.m. on 05/06/07, time will align itself in a perfect pattern, 2-3-4-5-6-7.

Computers make it possible for a mathematical proof to run as long as several thousand full-length novels combined. But human beings alone cannot verify such immense proofs. That, according to Ian Stewart, a professor of mathematics at Warwick University, in England, presents "a serious philosophical question" for mathematicians: "Can something be considered a proof if no human can verify it without a computer?"

One surgeon on a transplant center team at Johns Hopkins, Dorry Segev, happens to be married to a mathematician. His wife, Sommer Gentry, an assistant professor of mathematics at the U.S. Naval Academy, specializes in a procedure called optimization. On their drive home one evening, he asked whether she might be able to figure out how to make the best matches among a pool of incompatible pairs of kidney transplant donors and patients.

Scientists have solved one of the toughest problems in mathematics, performing a calculation to figure out the symmetry of a complicated 248-dimensional object known as the Lie group E8. The solution is so large that it would take days to download over a standard Internet connection.

This is a story about love. About inscrutable complexity and remarkable simplicity, about the promise of forever. It is about obsession and devotion, and grand gestures and 4,000-word love letters.
It is about a curious group of people with an almost religious zeal for a mind-numbing string of numbers. Actually one number, made up of a chain that is known — so far — to be more than one trillion digits long.