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Amateur Mathematician Finds Smallest Universal Cover
...John Baez, a mathematician at the University of California, Riverside. Baez lifted Lebesgue’s universal covering problem out of obscurity when he wrote about it in 2013 on his popular math...
Solution: ‘How Equality and Inequality Shape Birds and Bees’
...(1 + 4/15)/(2/5 + 4/15) = 29/15, or about 1.9. If you find the math daunting, you can get the same result by listing the expectations in a spreadsheet: The...
New Proof Shows Infinite Curves Come in Two Types
...split is contingent on the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer (BSD) conjecture being true. The BSD conjecture is one of the most famous open problems in math. Mathematicians are far from proving...
Mystery Math Whiz and Novelist Advance Permutation Problem
...under the radar of the mathematics community for seven years — apparently only one professional mathematician spotted it at the time, and he didn’t check it carefully. But in a...
The (Imaginary) Numbers at the Edge of Reality
Odd enough to potentially model the strangeness of the physical world, complex numbers with “imaginary” components are rooted in the familiar. Have you ever sat in a math classroom and...
Prepping for a Flood of Heavenly Bodies
...next step in physics, you actually have to do it that way. At that point, physics became linked to mathematics. Mathematics is the language of physics. We’re now going through...
Planets Found to Be Larger Than the Disks They Come From
...larger than the universe’s biggest star-skirts. This seems to defy math, or at least reason; planets shouldn’t be larger than the stuff they’re made from. The authors behind the new...
How Nature Defies Math in Keeping Ecosystems Stable
Paradoxically, the abundance of tight interactions among living species usually leads to disasters in ecological models. New analyses hint at how nature seemingly defies the math. Behind the beautiful facade...
Why Mathematicians Can’t Find the Hay in a Haystack
In math, sometimes the most common things are the hardest to find. The first time I heard a mathematician use the phrase, I was sure he’d misspoken. We were on...