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Quantized Academy

Quantized Academy

The Crooked Geometry of Round Trips

By Patrick Honner
January 13, 2021
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Imagine if we lived on a cube-shaped Earth. How would you find the shortest path around the world?

Quantized Academy

Some Math Problems Seem Impossible. That Can Be a Good Thing.

By Patrick Honner
November 18, 2020
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Struggling with math problems that can’t be solved helps us better understand the ones we can.

Quantized Academy

The Simple Math Problem We Still Can’t Solve

By Patrick Honner
September 22, 2020
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Despite recent progress on the notorious Collatz conjecture, we still don’t know whether a number can escape its infinite loop.

Quantized Academy

The Math of Social Distancing Is a Lesson in Geometry

By Patrick Honner
July 13, 2020
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How to safely reopen offices, schools and other public spaces while keeping people six feet apart comes down to a question mathematicians have been studying for centuries.

Quantized Academy

To Win This Numbers Game, Learn to Avoid Math Patterns

By Patrick Honner
May 7, 2020
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Sizing up patternless sets is hard, so mathematicians rely on simple bounds to help answer their questions.

Quantized Academy

How Rational Math Catches Slippery Irrational Numbers

By Patrick Honner
March 10, 2020
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Finding the best way to approximate the ever-elusive irrational numbers pits the infinitely large against the infinitely small.

Quantized Academy

How Simple Math Can Cover Even the Most Complex Holes

By Patrick Honner
January 8, 2020
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No one knows how to find the smallest shape that can cover all other shapes of a certain width. But high school geometry is getting us closer to an answer.

An illustration of a mathematician staring up at an infinite pile of cubes of varying sizes and colors.
Quantized Academy

Why the Sum of Three Cubes Is a Hard Math Problem

By Patrick Honner
November 5, 2019
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Looking for answers in infinite space is hard. High school math can help narrow your search.

Two competitors are racing to solve the multiplication problem 25 times 63 in two separate lanes of a running track. One competitor is using the standard multiplication algorithm while the other is using Karatsuba method.
Quantized Academy

On Your Mark, Get Set, Multiply

By Patrick Honner
September 23, 2019
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The way you learned to multiply works, but computers employ a faster algorithm.


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