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Erica Klarreich

Contributing Correspondent

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Latest Articles

An illustration of a mathematician on a ladder stringing red and blue beads against a tiled red backdrop dotted with blue circles.
combinatorics

Mathematician Hurls Structure and Disorder Into Century-Old Problem

By Erica Klarreich
December 15, 2021
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A new paper shows how to create longer disordered strings than mathematicians had thought possible, proving that a well-known recent conjecture is “spectacularly wrong.”

3D illustration of Gardam's crystallographic group
group theory

Mathematician Disproves 80-Year-Old Algebra Conjecture

By Erica Klarreich
April 12, 2021
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Inside the symmetries of a crystal shape, a postdoctoral researcher has unearthed a counterexample to a basic conjecture about multiplicative inverses.

geometry

Statistics Postdoc Tames Decades-Old Geometry Problem

By Erica Klarreich
March 1, 2021
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To the surprise of experts in the field, a postdoctoral statistician has solved one of the most important problems in high-dimensional convex geometry.

computer security

Computer Scientists Achieve ‘Crown Jewel’ of Cryptography

By Erica Klarreich
November 10, 2020
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A cryptographic master tool called indistinguishability obfuscation has for years seemed too good to be true. Three researchers have figured out that it can work.

An illustration of computer scientists looking down a new road that breaks open a traveling salesperson route.
algorithms

Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record

By Erica Klarreich
October 8, 2020
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After 44 years, there’s finally a better way to find approximate solutions to the notoriously difficult traveling salesperson problem.

An illustration of an ant walking in a straight line around a dodecahedron.
Abstractions blog

Mathematicians Report New Discovery About the Dodecahedron

By Erica Klarreich
August 31, 2020
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Three mathematicians have resolved a fundamental question about straight paths on the 12-sided Platonic solid.

number theory

Landmark Math Proof Clears Hurdle in Top Erdős Conjecture

By Erica Klarreich
August 3, 2020
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Two mathematicians have proved the first leg of Paul Erdős’ all-time favorite problem about number patterns.

A photograph of the mathematician James Maynard outside his home in Oxford, England.
profiles

A Number Theorist Who Solves the Hardest Easy Problems

By Erica Klarreich
July 1, 2020
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In his rapid ascent to the top of his field, James Maynard has cut a path through simple-sounding questions about prime numbers that have stumped mathematicians for centuries.

An illustration of a knot that mathematicians might study using tools called invariants.
Abstractions blog

In a Single Measure, Invariants Capture the Essence of Math Objects

By Erica Klarreich
June 2, 2020
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To distinguish between fundamentally different objects, mathematicians turn to invariants that encode the objects’ essential features.


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