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The Strange Second Life of String Theory
...it’s become almost unrecognizable, even to string theorists. “Things have gotten almost postmodern,” said Dijkgraaf, who is a painter as well as mathematical physicist. The mathematics that have come out...
Genetic Engineering to Clash With Evolution
...could be an important natural safety feature. Evolution is unpredictable by its very nature, but a handful of biologists are using mathematical models and careful lab experiments to try to...
Solution: ‘A Drunkard’s Walk in Manhattan’
...is the same process that underlies diffusion: the rate at which the sugar or sweetener spreads into your morning tea or coffee. The funny math book that I referred to...
The Neuroscience Behind Bad Decisions
...known as divisive normalization, spells out the math behind this recalibration process. It proposes that neurons can send more efficient messages if they encode in their sequence of spikes only...
A Drunkard’s Walk in Manhattan
...and a lifelong puzzle enthusiast. One of the most cherished mathematical learning moments of my youth came from an old and very funny math book, whose name I have sadly...
Moonshine Master Toys With String Theory
...Harvard University studying string theory, got to thinking about a paper that had recently been posted online. Its three coauthors had pointed out a numerical coincidence connecting far-flung mathematical objects....
A Bird’s-Eye View of Nature’s Hidden Order
...useful. From a mathematical standpoint, “the more you study it, the more elegant and conceptually compelling it seems,” said Henry Cohn, a mathematician and packing expert at Microsoft Research New...
Is Infinity Real?
Euclidean geometry has a way of turning mathematically inclined students into lifelong math lovers, and I was no exception. But a primitive assumption has always troubled me: The definition of...
Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
...papers posted online in recent weeks, mathematicians have solved a problem about the pattern-matching card game Set that predates the game itself. The solution, whose simplicity has stunned mathematicians, is...