Education

Looking for answers in infinite space is hard. High school math can help narrow your search.

The way you learned to multiply works, but computers employ a faster algorithm.

Polynomials aren’t just exercises in abstraction. They’re good at illuminating structure in surprising places.

A little high school geometry can help you understand the basic math behind movie recommendation engines.

In mathematics, where proofs are everything, evidence is important too. But evidence is only as good as the model, and modeling can be dangerous business. So how much evidence is enough?

A science fiction novelist and an internet commenter made breakthroughs on a longstanding problem about the number of ways you can arrange a set of items. What did they discover?

Odd enough to potentially model the strangeness of the physical world, complex numbers with “imaginary” components are rooted in the familiar.

Renee Reijo Pera has spent decades uncovering how the timing of embryonic development contributes to health and disease.

Studying the structure of existing friendships in your community can help you forge the best connections when forming a new circle of friends.