When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Mathematicians have solved a longstanding algebra problem, providing a general solution for ...

Ah, math. Take an easy problem we all studied in our teens, scale it up by just a couple of steps, and suddenly you’re facing something that has stumped generations of the world’s best mathematicians.

In a boon to algebra students everywhere, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University has devised a simpler and more efficient way to solve problems involving the quadratic equation. The new method was ...