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Years After the Early Death of a Math Genius, Her Ideas Gain New Life
...whether she would go into music or math. In 2015, both mathematicians ended up visiting the University of California, Berkeley, for a semester. Mirzakhani’s daughter and Anantharaman’s son were close...
String Theory Inspires a Brilliant, Baffling New Math Proof
...solutions have a richer, more complicated structure. The second category is where the mathematical juice is: It’s where mathematicians want to focus their attention to make major advances. But after...
How Unknowable Math Can Help Hide Secrets
A graduate student recently harnessed the complexity of mathematical proofs to create a powerful new tool in cryptography. Mathematicians spend most of their time thinking about what’s knowable. But the...
‘Huge Breakthrough’ in the Math of Imbalance
For the first time in 30 years, computer scientists have found a better way to allocate objects evenly between two groups. One does not need a doctorate in mathematics to...
Biology Might Not Be Quantum, but Its Math Is Quantumlike
Scientists have a history of trying — and failing — to link biology and quantum mechanics. The real connection between them may be in the math. Two decades ago, scientists...
A Math Theory for Why People Hallucinate
...emerging hypothesis points to a variation of the mechanism that produces so-called “Turing patterns.” In a 1952 paper, the British mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing proposed a mathematical mechanism for...
The New Math of Wrinkling
...be seen as the solution to a geometric problem. “It is a beautiful piece of mathematical analysis,” said Stefan Müller of the University of Bonn’s Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in...
Cash for Math: The Erdős Prizes Live On
...third mathematician involved, Paul Erdős, became perhaps the most notorious mathematician of the 20th century. Erdős spent nearly his entire life crashing on other mathematicians’ couches and subsisting on the...
Pentagon Tiling Proof Solves Century-Old Math Problem
A French mathematician has completed the classification of all convex pentagons, and therefore all convex polygons, that tile the plane. One of the oldest problems in geometry asks which shapes...