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How the Slowest Computer Programs Illuminate Math’s Fundamental Limits
...has become an object of study in its own right, because it has yielded connections to some of the loftiest concepts and open problems in mathematics. “In math, there is...
How Ancient War Trickery Is Alive in Math Today
Legend says the Chinese military once used a mathematical ruse to conceal its troop numbers. The technique relates to many deep areas of modern math research. Imagine you’re a general...
The Simple Math Behind the Mighty Roots of Unity
Solutions to the simplest polynomial equations — called “roots of unity” — have an elegant structure that mathematicians still use to study some of math’s greatest open questions. If you’ve...
Hobbyist Finds Math’s Elusive ‘Einstein’ Tile
...an emerita mathematics professor at Moravian University in Pennsylvania. She described herself as “flabbergasted.” Mathematicians have been searching for a tile like the hat since the 1960s, when Robert Berger...
The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot Set, Math’s Famed Fractal
The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot Set, Math’s Most Famous Fractal For decades, a small group of mathematicians has patiently unraveled the mystery of what was once math’s most popular...
How America’s Fastest Swimmers Use Math to Win Gold
...can. I’m a pure mathematician by training. That can be rather lonely. So this is perhaps the one time in my life where my training as a mathematical scientist seems...
Big Advance on Simple-Sounding Math Problem Was a Century in the Making
...to math for comfort. “I found mathematics really helpful for that,” he said. “Mathematics is not just about proving theorems — it’s about a way to interact with reality, maybe.”...
A Classical Math Problem Gets Pulled Into the Modern World
A century ago, the great mathematician David Hilbert posed a probing question in pure mathematics. A recent advance in optimization theory is bringing Hilbert’s work into a world of self-driving...
How Physics Found a Geometric Structure for Math to Play With
...symplectic spaces captured mathematicians’ imaginations. “Mathematicians were already interested in complex numbers; they were already interested in the motion of planets,” Murphy said. “So if you come along and say,...