Aaron Landesman. Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer Science & Tech What it takes to solve math’s toughest problems Sy Boles Harvard Staff Writer September 9, 2026 6 min read Logic skills, yes, but also two seemingly incompatible traits: Confidence and humility This is a story about keeping the faith in a discipline not exactly known for its religiosity: mathematics. The field of arithmetic statistics — the study of statistical patterns in arithmetic objects such as number fields, class groups, and elliptic curves — rests on sets of conjectures whose predictions have been only partially proven. In 2001, mathematician Jordan Ellenberg ’93, Ph.D. ’98, and some colleagues set out on a humb...