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A New Map Traces the Limits of Computation
...mathematical proof that the current best algorithm was “optimal” — in other words, that finding a more efficient way to compute edit distance was mathematically impossible. The Boston Globe celebrated...
A Twisted Path to Equation-Free Prediction
...late 1970s, the Dutch mathematician Floris Takens was studying chaos theory, which had begun to emerge in the 1960s as scientists recognized that many of nature’s complex phenomena seem to...
Theorists Draw Closer to Perfect Coloring
...But since the 1960s, mathematicians have escaped these coloring frustrations by working with so-called perfect graphs, which “behave very nicely with respect to coloring,” said Chudnovsky, a 38-year-old math professor...
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...