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Leila Sloman

Contributing Correspondent

Latest Articles

geometry

Mathematicians Cross the Line to Get to the Point

By Leila Sloman
September 25, 2023
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A new paper establishes a long-conjectured bound about the size of the overlap between sets of lines and points.

geometry

The Biggest Smallest Triangle Just Got Smaller

By Leila Sloman
September 8, 2023
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A new proof breaks a decades-long drought of progress on the problem of estimating the size of triangles created by cramming points into a square.

graph theory

New Proof Shows That ‘Expander’ Graphs Synchronize

By Leila Sloman
July 24, 2023
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The proof establishes new conditions that cause connected oscillators to sway in sync.

Ramsey theory

The Lawlessness of Large Numbers

By Leila Sloman
July 7, 2023
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Mathematicians can often figure out what happens as quantities grow infinitely large. What about when they are just a little big?

A visual argument explaining why the Ramsey number of three is six.
graph theory

A Very Big Small Leap Forward in Graph Theory

By Leila Sloman
May 2, 2023
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Four mathematicians have found a new upper limit to the “Ramsey number,” a crucial property describing unavoidable structure in graphs.

An illustration of a sequence that avoid arithmetic progression, shown as a blue staircase jumping among numbers from one to forty.
combinatorics

Surprise Computer Science Proof Stuns Mathematicians

By Leila Sloman
March 21, 2023
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For decades, mathematicians have been inching forward on a problem about which sets contain evenly spaced patterns of three numbers. Last month, two computer scientists blew past all of those results.

A panoply of colored fractions
combinatorics

Coloring by Numbers Reveals Arithmetic Patterns in Fractions

By Leila Sloman
March 15, 2023
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In a recent paper, two mathematicians showed that a particular pattern is unavoidable when fractions are categorized.

a small human figure stands on a golden geometric structure while the sky is full of curving pink and purple grids
graph theory

Quantum Field Theory Pries Open Mathematical Puzzle

By Leila Sloman
February 16, 2023
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Mathematicians have struggled to understand the moduli space of graphs. A new paper uses tools from physics to peek inside.

topology

Mathematicians Eliminate Long-Standing Threat to Knot Conjecture

By Leila Sloman
February 2, 2023
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A new proof shows that a knot some thought would contradict the famed slice-ribbon conjecture doesn’t.


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About the author

Leila Sloman is a math writer based in Princeton, New Jersey. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford University in 2021, and has also written for Popular Mechanics and Scientific American. She was an intern at Quanta Magazine in 2022.
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