Latest Articles
How Rational Math Catches Slippery Irrational Numbers
Finding the best way to approximate the ever-elusive irrational numbers pits the infinitely large against the infinitely small.
How Simple Math Can Cover Even the Most Complex Holes
No one knows how to find the smallest shape that can cover all other shapes of a certain width. But high school geometry is getting us closer to an answer.
Why the Sum of Three Cubes Is a Hard Math Problem
Looking for answers in infinite space is hard. High school math can help narrow your search.
On Your Mark, Get Set, Multiply
The way you learned to multiply works, but computers employ a faster algorithm.
Color Me Polynomial
Polynomials aren’t just exercises in abstraction. They’re good at illuminating structure in surprising places.
How Geometry, Data and Neighbors Predict Your Favorite Movies
A little high school geometry can help you understand the basic math behind movie recommendation engines.
Where Proof, Evidence and Imagination Intersect
In mathematics, where proofs are everything, evidence is important too. But evidence is only as good as the model, and modeling can be dangerous business. So how much evidence is enough?
Unscrambling the Hidden Secrets of Superpermutations
A science fiction novelist and an internet commenter made breakthroughs on a longstanding problem about the number of ways you can arrange a set of items. What did they discover?
The (Imaginary) Numbers at the Edge of Reality
Odd enough to potentially model the strangeness of the physical world, complex numbers with “imaginary” components are rooted in the familiar.