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Mathematicians Tame Turbulence in Flattened Fluids
...of smooth streams of fluid into chaotic vortices, doesn’t just make for bumpy plane rides. It also throws a wrench into the very mathematics used to describe atmospheres, oceans and...
Her Key to Modeling Brains: Ignore the Right Details
Being able to think like a physicist helps Carina Curto, a mathematician-turned-neuroscientist, pull insights about the human brain out of theoretical models. In May 2013, the mathematician Carina Curto attended...
Four Is Not Enough
...7. We just don’t know which! This surprising result from de Grey, a biologist and recreational mathematician, has re-energized the mathematical community around the problem of coloring the plane. A...
The Physics of Glass Opens a Window Into Biology
...to an underlying geometric minimal surface problem. Consider the following math problem: You have to tile space with a certain number of tiles, and each tile has to have the...
The Slippery Math of Causation
...causation? Unlike correlation, which has a specific mathematical meaning, causation is a slippery concept that has been debated by philosophers for millennia. It seems to get conflated with our intuitions...
A Classical Math Problem Gets Pulled Into the Modern World
A century ago, the great mathematician David Hilbert posed a probing question in pure mathematics. A recent advance in optimization theory is bringing Hilbert’s work into a world of self-driving...
First Big Steps Toward Proving the Unique Games Conjecture
...bold conjecture is helping mathematicians explore the precise limits of computation. Kevin Hong for Quanta Magazine Video produced by the Simons Foundation, with the cooperation of the International Mathematical Union....
Decades-Old Graph Problem Yields to Amateur Mathematician
...a potential Polymath problem. Polymath began about 10 years ago when Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, wanted to find a way to facilitate massive online collaborations...
A Revealer of Secrets in the Data of Life and the Universe
...and condensed for clarity. Growing up in Jamaica, did you always enjoy math? My mother was very good at mathematics. Because she was a teacher, learning did not stop simply...