In the 1995 Halloween episode of The Simpsons, Homer Simpson finds a portal to the mysterious Third Dimension behind a bookcase, and desperate to escape his in-laws, he plunges through. He finds ...

A paper that leaked onto the Web late last week claims to have solved one of the great modern problems in mathematics and computer science. Vinay Deolalikar, a principal research scientist at HP labs, ...

A diagram showing the relevant complexity classes in the P vs NP problem. “P” problems are solvable in polynomial time; “NP” problems might be solvable in polynomial time, and are checkable in ...

In computational complexity theory, P and NP are two classes of problems. P is the class of decision problems that a deterministic Turing machine can solve in polynomial time. In useful terms, any ...

When computer scientists hang out at cocktail parties, they're apt to chat, among other things, about the single most important unsolved problem in computer science: the question, Does P = NP?

Has the biggest question in computer science been solved? On 6 August, Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, sent out draft copies of a paper titled ...

Ian Stewart's Visions of Infinity: The Great Mathematical Problems is an entertaining and fresh look at some of the most vexing problems facing the field of mathematics. We asked him to pick the ...

Has the biggest question in computer science been solved? On 6 August, Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, sent out draft copies of a paper titled ...