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Be Still My Pulsating Sequence
Our Insights problem this month is based on a sequence of integers which comes from Neil Sloane, a mathematician who is arguably the world’s greatest authority on such sequences. Contributing...
Nature’s Critical Warning System
...have been studied mathematically — such as food webs that, unlike Peter Lake’s, are so chaotic that they do not exhibit critical transitions at all — the same signal might...
The Fabulously Fair Feast
This month’s Insights puzzle arises out of a peculiar weekly bonding ritual of four fair-minded friends. Amar, Bob, Ching and Danica are math graduate students who share a house. Their...
Hope Rekindled for Perplexing Proof
...Mathematical Institute at Oxford in the most significant attempt thus far to make sense of what Mochizuki had done. Minhyong Kim, a mathematician at Oxford and one of the three...
How Strange Twists in DNA Orchestrate Life
...language of DNA topology that could direct a host of cellular processes. “It’s intriguing that DNA behaves this way, that topology matters in living organisms,” said Craig Benham, a mathematical...
Solution: ‘The Problem With Dancing Shapes’
...song, at least 17 triangles will be empty. For this problem there was a slight twist in the tail — the kind of twist that math teachers add in order...
Michael Atiyah’s Imaginative State of Mind
...first half of his career connecting mathematics to mathematics, and the second half connecting mathematics to physics. Atiyah is best known for the “index theorem,” devised in 1963 with Isadore...
Solution: A Hat Trick + 1 of Hat Puzzles
...the expected amount? The winning strategy here can be called the “checksum modulo-3” method. It uses two mathematical principles: the checksum (you add a bunch of numbers and take the...
Is Infinity Real?
Euclidean geometry has a way of turning mathematically inclined students into lifelong math lovers, and I was no exception. But a primitive assumption has always troubled me: The definition of...