Mathematician Kevin Buzzard of Imperial College London is training computers how to prove one of the most famous problems in math history: Fermat’s last theorem. Resolving the problem isn’t the point.

The quest to make mathematics rigorous has a long and spotty history — one mathematicians can learn from as they push to formalize everything in the computer program Lean. In ancient Greece, Euclid ...

Math students may not blink at calculating probabilities, measuring the area beneath curves or evaluating matrices, yet they often find themselves at sea when first confronted with writing proofs.