Patrick Honner

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.

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

How many colors do you need to color an infinite plane so that no points 1 unit apart are the same color?

What does John Nash’s game theory equilibrium concept look like in Rock-Paper-Scissors?