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The Universal Pattern Popping Up in Math, Physics and Biology
...series dives deep into math and physics theories, kicking off with ‘universality,’ a phenomenon that reveals underlying mathematical connections in the world,” Driscoll wrote in an email. “Depicting universality on...
Solution: ‘Natural Law and Elegant Math’
...power of beautiful mathematics in helping to lay bare the secrets of the world. In last month’s Insights puzzle, we used Eugene Wigner’s famous article “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics...
Secrets of Math From the Bee Whisperer
As Scarlett Howard taught honeybees to do arithmetic, they showed her how fundamental numbers might be to all brains. Scarlett Howard teaches math to honeybees. She began with a few...
After Centuries, a Seemingly Simple Math Problem Gets an Exact Solution
...an acre? It sounds like high school geometry, but mathematicians and math enthusiasts have been pondering this problem in various forms for more than 270 years. And while they’ve successfully...
How the Slowest Computer Programs Illuminate Math’s Fundamental Limits
...has become an object of study in its own right, because it has yielded connections to some of the loftiest concepts and open problems in mathematics. “In math, there is...
How Ancient War Trickery Is Alive in Math Today
Legend says the Chinese military once used a mathematical ruse to conceal its troop numbers. The technique relates to many deep areas of modern math research. Imagine you’re a general...
The Simple Math Behind the Mighty Roots of Unity
Solutions to the simplest polynomial equations — called “roots of unity” — have an elegant structure that mathematicians still use to study some of math’s greatest open questions. If you’ve...
Hobbyist Finds Math’s Elusive ‘Einstein’ Tile
...an emerita mathematics professor at Moravian University in Pennsylvania. She described herself as “flabbergasted.” Mathematicians have been searching for a tile like the hat since the 1960s, when Robert Berger...
The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot Set, Math’s Famed Fractal
The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot Set, Math’s Most Famous Fractal For decades, a small group of mathematicians has patiently unraveled the mystery of what was once math’s most popular...