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The Fabulously Fair Feast
This month’s Insights puzzle arises out of a peculiar weekly bonding ritual of four fair-minded friends. Amar, Bob, Ching and Danica are math graduate students who share a house. Their...
Math Quartet Joins Forces on Unified Theory
...mathematics departments in the world. That a number of elite mathematicians would come out of the same class at a top university is unusual, but not unprecedented. The most recent...
‘Outsiders’ Crack 50-Year-Old Math Problem
...entire system? Richard Kadison (left), pictured at the 1970 International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice, France, and Isadore Singer posed a mathematics problem in 1959 that stood unsolved for more...
Nature’s Critical Warning System
...have been studied mathematically — such as food webs that, unlike Peter Lake’s, are so chaotic that they do not exhibit critical transitions at all — the same signal might...
Be Still My Pulsating Sequence
Our Insights problem this month is based on a sequence of integers which comes from Neil Sloane, a mathematician who is arguably the world’s greatest authority on such sequences. Contributing...
Theorists Draw Closer to Perfect Coloring
...But since the 1960s, mathematicians have escaped these coloring frustrations by working with so-called perfect graphs, which “behave very nicely with respect to coloring,” said Chudnovsky, a 38-year-old math professor...
A Twisted Path to Equation-Free Prediction
...late 1970s, the Dutch mathematician Floris Takens was studying chaos theory, which had begun to emerge in the 1960s as scientists recognized that many of nature’s complex phenomena seem to...
How to Create Art With Mathematics
The beautiful color illustration of frieze patterns above is taken from Frank A. Farris’ Creating Symmetry: The Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns (Princeton University Press, 2015), a math book that,...
A New Map Traces the Limits of Computation
...mathematical proof that the current best algorithm was “optimal” — in other words, that finding a more efficient way to compute edit distance was mathematically impossible. The Boston Globe celebrated...