Erica Klarreich

Contributing Correspondent

Latest Articles

The Math Evangelist Who Preaches Problem-Solving

September 13, 2022

Richard Rusczyk, founder of Art of Problem Solving, has a vision for bringing “joyous, beautiful math” — and problem-solving — to classrooms everywhere.

A Solver of the Hardest Easy Problems About Prime Numbers

July 5, 2022

On his way to winning a Fields Medal, James Maynard has cut a path through simple-sounding questions about prime numbers that have stumped mathematicians for centuries.

In Times of Scarcity, War and Peace, a Ukrainian Finds the Magic in Math

July 5, 2022

With her homeland mired in war, the sphere-packing number theorist Maryna Viazovska has become the second woman to win a Fields Medal in the award’s 86-year history.

Researchers Achieve ‘Absurdly Fast’ Algorithm for Network Flow

June 8, 2022

Computer scientists can now solve a decades-old problem in practically the time it takes to write it down.

Which Computational Universe Do We Live In?

April 18, 2022

Cryptographers want to know which of five possible worlds we inhabit, which will reveal whether truly secure cryptography is even possible.

Researchers Identify ‘Master Problem’ Underlying All Cryptography

April 6, 2022

The existence of secure cryptography depends on one of the oldest questions in computational complexity.

Mathematician Hurls Structure and Disorder Into Century-Old Problem

December 15, 2021

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.”

Mathematician Disproves 80-Year-Old Algebra Conjecture

April 12, 2021

Inside the symmetries of a crystal shape, a postdoctoral researcher has unearthed a counterexample to a basic conjecture about multiplicative inverses.

Statistics Postdoc Tames Decades-Old Geometry Problem

March 1, 2021

To the surprise of experts in the field, a postdoctoral statistician has solved one of the most important problems in high-dimensional convex geometry.

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