It is easy to come to the conclusion that most of the important mathematics has already been done. Many students spend years studying mathematics without ever encountering anything from the past century.

Surprisingly, this perception is far from the truth! Mathematics is still a very active field of research, with more than 40,000 articles published on the subject online so far this year. This enthusiasm is present in part because of the ever-changing technological landscape.

With new technologies popping up, we need novel mathematics designed to answer the questions these fresh ideas pose. Moreover, mathematics has and will continue to provide ways to make our lives better – from finding ways to model and treat certain illnesses to finding ways to reduce our carbon footprint.

Of course, another reason people research maths is because the questions posed are interesting. Even though we have been doing mathematics for millennia, there are still many interesting open problems which, if solved, will have fundamental impacts on the world as a whole.

One famous such problem is the Riemann hypothesis, which was proposed in 1859 and is yet unsolved! In practice, mathematicians end up working on intermediate steps to bigger problems, which culminate through years of community effort into mathematical discoveries that end up shaping the world to come.