Perplexing the Web, One Probability Puzzle at a Time
In late January, Daniel Litt posed an innocent probability puzzle on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) — and set a corner of the Twitterverse on fire. Imagine, he wrote, that you...
View Article‘Groups’ Underpin Modern Math. Here’s How They Work.
Mathematics started with numbers — clear, concrete, intuitive. Over the last two centuries, however, it has become a far more abstract enterprise. One of the first major steps down this road was taken...
View ArticleMathematicians Discover New Shapes to Solve Decades-Old Geometry Problem
In 1986, after the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds into its flight, the eminent physicist Richard Feynman was called in to find out what had gone wrong. He later demonstrated that the...
View ArticleWhen Data Is Missing, Scientists Guess. Then Guess Again.
Data is almost always incomplete. Patients drop out of clinical trials and survey respondents skip questions; schools fail to report scores, and governments ignore elements of their economies. When...
View ArticleBig Advance on Simple-Sounding Math Problem Was a Century in the Making
One morning last November, the mathematician Hector Pasten finally solved the problem that had been dogging him for more than a decade by using a time-tested productivity hack: procrastination. He was...
View ArticleMath Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan
One afternoon in January 2011, Hussein Mourtada leapt onto his desk and started dancing. He wasn’t alone: Some of the graduate students who shared his Paris office were there, too. But he didn’t care....
View ArticleMath’s ‘Bunkbed Conjecture’ Has Been Debunked
Much of mathematics is driven by intuition, by a deep-rooted sense of what should be true. But sometimes instinct can lead a mathematician astray. Early evidence might not represent the bigger picture;...
View ArticleHow Is AI Changing the Science of Prediction?
With lots of data, a strong model and statistical thinking, scientists can make predictions about all sorts of complex phenomena. Today, this practice is evolving to harness the power of machine...
View ArticleNew Elliptic Curve Breaks 18-Year-Old Record
In August, a pair of mathematicians discovered an exotic, record-breaking curve. In doing so, they tapped into a major open question about one of the oldest and most fundamental kinds of equations in...
View ArticleMathematical Thinking Isn’t What You Think It Is
David Bessis was drawn to mathematics for the same reason that many people are driven away: He didn’t understand how it worked. Unlike other creative processes, like making music, which can be heard,...
View ArticleTeen Mathematicians Tie Knots Through a Mind-Blowing Fractal
In the fall of 2021, Malors Espinosa set out to devise a special type of math problem. As with any good research question, it would have to be thought-provoking, its solution nontrivial — something...
View ArticleMathematicians Uncover a New Way to Count Prime Numbers
A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime numbers. The primes — numbers that are only divisible by themselves...
View ArticleThe Year in Math
In May, a team of nine mathematicians announced a major breakthrough. They had proved what is called the geometric Langlands conjecture — a central component of a broader research program to build a...
View ArticleRational or Not? This Basic Math Question Took Decades to Answer.
In June 1978, the organizers of a large mathematics conference in Marseille, France, announced a last-minute addition to the program. During the lunch hour, the mathematician Roger Apéry would present...
View ArticleMathematicians Discover New Way for Spheres to ‘Kiss’
In May of 1694, in a lecture hall at the University of Cambridge, Isaac Newton and the astronomer David Gregory started to contemplate the nature of the stars, only to end up with a math puzzle that...
View ArticleThe Jagged, Monstrous Function That Broke Calculus
Calculus is a powerful mathematical tool. But for hundreds of years after its invention in the 17th century, it stood on a shaky foundation. Its core concepts were rooted in intuition and informal...
View ArticleNew Proofs Probe the Limits of Mathematical Truth
The world of mathematics is full of unreachable corners, where unsolvable problems live. Now, yet another has been exposed. In 1900, the eminent mathematician David Hilbert announced a list of 23 key...
View ArticleThe Largest Sofa You Can Move Around a Corner
If you’ve ever moved into a new home, then you know how difficult it can be to steer bulky furniture through narrow hallways or around awkward corners. Mathematicians have been trying to solve this...
View ArticleAfter 20 Years, Math Couple Solves Major Group Theory Problem
In 2003, a German graduate student named Britta Späth encountered the McKay conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in the mathematical realm known as group theory. At first her goals were...
View ArticleYears After the Early Death of a Math Genius, Her Ideas Gain New Life
In the early 2000s, a young graduate student at Harvard University began to chart an exotic mathematical universe — one inhabited by shapes that defy geometric intuition. Her name was Maryam...
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