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Math Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan
...Hidden within that structure were mysterious mathematical statements first written down a century earlier by a young Indian mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan. They had come to him in a dream....
The Hidden Math of Ocean Waves Crashes Into View
The math of even the simplest ocean waves is notoriously uncooperative. A team of Italian mathematicians has made major advances toward understanding it. The best perk of Alberto Maspero’s job,...
Why Math’s Final Axiom Proved So Controversial
Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is so widely accepted that modern mathematicians hardly think about it. But believing in its core principles didn’t come easily. How do mathematicians decide that something is...
The Math of Catastrophe
Tipping points in our climate predictions are both wildly dramatic and wildly uncertain. Can mathematicians make them useful? In the 1960s, the Soviet climatologist and mathematician Mikhail Budyko set out...
A Number Theorist Who Bridges Math and Time
...the idea of Olympiads,” he said. “I think if that was what mathematicians really did, I wouldn’t enjoy being a mathematician.” Mathematics is a comparatively straightforward subject in which to...
Why the Sum of Three Cubes Is a Hard Math Problem
Looking for answers in infinite space is hard. High school math can help narrow your search. Given that humans have been studying numbers for thousands of years, you might think...
New Math Book Rescues Landmark Topology Proof
...correct at all. In a 2012 post on MathOverflow, one commenter referred to the proof as a “monstrosity of a paper” and said he had “never met a mathematician who...
Quanta Relaunches Hyperjumps Math Game
Explore a universe of numbers and arithmetic in our new and improved interactive math game, Hyperjumps! It’s the year 2718. Humanity has invented a warp drive that enables a spacecraft...
How Does Math Keep Secrets?
...mathematical analysis. And a key figure in bringing about the mathematical analysis of cryptography was Claude Shannon, who in the late 1940s wrote some influential papers, starting with a mathematical...