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‘Sensational’ Proof Delivers New Insights Into Prime Numbers
...mathematicians much deeper certainty about how prime numbers are distributed, while also implying a host of other consequences — making it arguably the most important open question in math. Mathematicians...
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...
What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us?
...might reveal about the natural world. Natalie is a professor of mathematics and statistics at Vassar College. Her research is primarily on two-dimensional hierarchical tilings, which are mathematical models for...
How Is Science Even Possible?
How are scientists able to crack fundamental questions about nature and life? How does math make the complex cosmos understandable? In this episode, the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld and co-host Steven...
The New Math of How Large-Scale Order Emerges
...to what the component parts are doing. Using a mathematical formalism called computational mechanics, the researchers identified criteria for determining which systems have this kind of hierarchical structure. They tested...
How Failure Has Made Mathematics Stronger
The topologist Danny Calegari discusses the inevitability of disappointment in math, and how to learn from it. Reading a math paper is a bit like having dinner at a nice...
Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjecture
...Cheeger of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. “And how in God’s name could you construct a counterexample to it?” In this area of mathematics, said...
Ecologists Struggle to Get a Grip on ‘Keystone Species’
More than 50 years after Bob Paine’s experiment with starfish, hundreds of species have been pronounced “keystones” in their ecosystems. Has the powerful metaphor lost its mathematical meaning? Anne Salomon’s...
Geometers Engineer New Tools to Wrangle Spacecraft Orbits
...to planetary motion, but felt out of his depth mathematically. “It was really exciting to see the mathematicians trying to bring their expertise down into the engineering side,” he said....