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The Tricky Translation of Mathematical Ideas
Big advances in math can happen when mathematicians move ideas into areas where they seem like they shouldn’t belong. My latest story is about the mathematician June Huh, who came...
A Path Less Taken to the Peak of the Math World
...a theorem by the German mathematician David Hilbert that stands as one of the most important breakthroughs in 20th-century mathematics. Read the related Abstractions post: The Tricky Translation of Mathematical...
Yitang Zhang’s Santa Barbara Beach Walk
...of China’s top math students and completing his doctorate at Purdue University in Indiana, for seven years Zhang could not find work as a mathematician. At one point, he worked...
Cash for Math: The Erdős Prizes Live On
...third mathematician involved, Paul Erdős, became perhaps the most notorious mathematician of the 20th century. Erdős spent nearly his entire life crashing on other mathematicians’ couches and subsisting on the...
A Theory of Reality as More Than the Sum of Its Parts
New math shows how, contrary to conventional scientific wisdom, conscious beings and other macroscopic entities might have greater influence over the future than does the sum of their microscopic components....
A Puzzle of Clever Connections Nears a Happy End
The three young friends who devised the “happy ending” problem became some of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century, but were never able to solve their own puzzle....
The Mathematics of Juggling
Juggling has advanced enormously in recent decades, thanks in part to the mathematical study of possible patterns. The late computer scientist Claude Shannon has a well-deserved reputation as the father...
A Defense of the Reality of Time
...reality. Change is real, as opposed to an illusion or an artifact of perspective. The laws of physics act within time to generate each moment. Mixing mathematics, physics and philosophy,...
Tim Maudlin: A Defense of the Reality of Time
Tim Maudlin explains how math has led physicists to believe some very strange things about the nature of time. Edwin Tse for Quanta Magazine...