You are looking for
Advanced search
In Mathematics, It Often Takes a Good Map to Find Answers
...first. Mathematicians are often in the same situation as da Vinci: They have big dreams, but mathematical knowledge may not be advanced enough to fulfill them. Depending on who you...
Why Mathematicians Re-Prove What They Already Know
...bother to do this? For one thing, it’s fun. More importantly, “I think the line between recreational math and serious math is very thin,” said William Gasarch, a professor of...
How Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics
...were his actual mathematical contributions? What Albert Einstein was to 20th-century physics, Alexander Grothendieck was to 20th-century mathematics. He is much less well known because math gets technical even more...
Strange Numbers Found in Particle Collisions
...collision will play out as sketched. “In some sense Feynman invented this diagram to encode complicated math as a bookkeeping device,” said Sergei Gukov, a theoretical physicist and mathematician at...
Rediet Abebe on Using Algorithms for Social Justice
...letters from some of the world’s top mathematicians saying what a tremendous talent she was in abstract math. And curiously — and for me very exciting — she wanted to...
Robbert Dijkgraaf on Exploring Quantum Reality
...call it quantum mathematics in physics. But I think it’s also very important movement just within pure math itself. [MUSIC PLAYING] Strogatz: When he speaks of quantum mathematics, he means...
The Man Who Stole Infinity
Long-Lost Letters Reveal the Lies That Gave Rise To Modern Math In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. A...
Game Theory Calls Cooperation Into Question
...strategies were selfish ones that led to extortion, not cooperation. Plotkin found the duo’s math remarkable in its elegance. But the outcome troubled him. Nature includes numerous examples of cooperative...
A Design Dilemma Solved, Minus Designs
...the exception, mathematicians wondered, or the rule? “It was one of the most famous problems in combinatorics,” said Gil Kalai, a mathematician at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He recalls...