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New Conversations, Deep Questions, Bold Ideas in Season Four of ‘The Joy of Why’
...joy in your science? STROGATZ: Well, math generally, but especially how math connects to the real world. I’m what would be called an applied mathematician, and so that means, where’s...
What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity?
Mathematicians Want to Banish Infinity. What Might They Gain? Ultrafinitism, a philosophy that rejects the infinite, has long been dismissed as mathematical heresy. But it is also producing new insights...
The Cryptographer Who Ensures We Can Trust Our Computers
...me a math riddle. As hard as you want, but if I solve, I go.’” She usually went. Her dormant love of math finally awakened in college, when she began...
The Musical, Magical Number Theorist
...a remarkable mathematical intuition. “Teach me more math!” he would badger his mother, Mira Bhargava, a mathematics professor at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. When he was 3 years old...
A Traveler Who Finds Stability in the Natural World
...point,” he said. Figalli turned toward serious math in his third year of high school. A mathematician colleague of his father’s encouraged Figalli to participate in the International Mathematical Olympiad,...
A Primordial Nucleus Behind the Elements of Life
...field theory employs a math trick sometimes used in high school calculus. In the same way that a mathematical function, such as a curve on a graph, can be approximated...
Is Nature Unnatural?
...“Particle physicists, especially string theorists, had this dream of predicting uniquely all the constants of nature,” Bousso explained. “Everything would just come out of math and pi and twos. And...
Together and Alone, Closing the Prime Gap
...California, Los Angeles, a winner of the Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honor, had created a “Polymath project,” an open, online collaboration to improve the bound that attracted dozens of participants....
To Settle Infinity Dispute, a New Law of Logic
...as the fundamental laws of mathematics. Most mathematicians simply ignore the holes, which lie in abstract realms with few practical or scientific ramifications. But for the stewards of math’s logical...